Keele University Impact Report

We are very proud to share this with you all. A couple of years ago,  I delivered a talk to Keele University criminology students. 

The wonderful head of department Dr Clare Griffiths liked the idea of our model so much that she applied for some funding to do an independent study on the impact that Shropshire Supports Refugees has had over the years. We think it proves that our holistic wrap-around service - facilitating offers of support and responding to requests , partnering with as many people as possible and working closely with the local authority - is the ideal model. 

 

Thank you to all the partnerships that we’ve had across the county, the amount of help we’ve had from other charities, third sector and statutory teams, the invitations I get to sit on joint meetings with the local authority. We would have not been able to be this effective without the support of Shropshire Council in particular Laura Fisher who had faith in our vision.

This has been a massive movement in the county of local people rising to the challenge of making settlement a positive and we should all be proud. 

 

The recommendations are all valid but this report was done a few months ago and we have already ticked a lot of boxes since then including becoming an OISC registered immigration level 2 service ( thank you TNL), improving our data capture systems and back of house systems (we have now got salesforce up and running).

 

We already share our impact reports on the Shropshire Council website specifically around the Ukrainian project and we release an annual report for the rest but we will be looking at ways of increasing opportunities to share

 

https://next.shropshire.gov.uk/resettlement-refugees-and-asylum-seekers/news/

https://www.shropshiresupportsrefugees.org/our-impact

 

Increasing the knowledge base around the county and in nurturing more hubs of knowledge is on our list of things to do next year and we are already working with a team of volunteers in Telford to achieve this. Also more consultations with people who use our services will be happening. 

The past 3 years has seen approx 2500 arrive in the county - it’s been a massive emergency response, but SSR is looking forward to stabilising, and fine tuning our services to ensure the sustainability of our charity.

 

We have applied to some grants recently to increase our mental health support capacity and partnered with a new organisation as well as existing partnerships to do that with so fingers crossed.

 

The rest are slightly out of our hands, but absolutely right. 

Services that have been developed like this to meet a new growing need cannot afford to be lost. Thank you to Dr Griffiths, Lisa Snow and the rest of the team for putting the time and effort into this.

The exciting bit is that Dr Griffiths is keen to come back and do further study and an update on developments, so watch this space!