Belonging

Sabrina is a volunteer with Sound Vault Studios, a charity in Birmingham, as a Creative English facilitator. She has also run classes in a mosque and a busy community centre, but mostly ran a class with a lovely group in a local residential care home. […]

This week, Georgia reports from a Creative English Family Fun session held at a local community hub. One of the main aims of FaithAction’s Creative English programme is to build confidence; as highlighted in research by the programme’s author Dr Anne Smith, many know the […]

A friend who works for a café run by a faith-based charity recently told me about one of their regular customers whom she had been able to help. This elderly man’s wife had been taken into hospital, but he was confused and did not know exactly where she was. Without anyone else to rely on, he was alone and distressed.

This week, we’re excited to catch up with some of the team from the Inspirational Training Institute (ITI) in Bradford, one of our new hubs delivering Creative English with funding from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. I had the opportunity to speak […]

I am hugely proud and privileged to have the opportunity to work with amazing volunteers across the country who are delivering the Creative English programme in their communities. In this role, I’ve been lucky enough to travel round the country, seeing the amazing work that […]

This week, we witnessed Mamoudou Gassama, a migrant from Mali, hit the headlines – with an extraordinary video of him scaling four stories up the side of a building in Paris to rescue a four-year-old child dangling from a balcony. This remarkable feat of resourcefulness […]

Next week is Mental Health Awareness Week. What has this got to do with faith communities? Well, more than you might think. If one in four people experience some kind of difficulty with their mental health in any given year, then there’s no way that […]

This week we had the pleasure of speaking to Fatemah Al-Ansare, the Events and Publicity Manager for the Iraqi Welfare Association, a community hub in Wembley. The IWA has a large focus on welfare – running our own Creative English programme plus fitness groups and […]

At dinner last week with a number of friends from Eastern Europe, our conversation moved from the nerve agent attack in Salisbury to what patriotism meant to us and who felt they belonged and wanted to stay in the UK.  My dinner companions were all […]

The Government has released its long-awaited integration strategy, developed methodically behind the scenes with the close involvement of civil society organisations – including providers of community-based English programmes like Creative English. As Eric Pickles, former Secretary of State for Communities, said when the 2010 coalition […]