This is a list of resources for migrants and refugees in the UK and Europe, and related organisations, originally crowd-sourced and storified on twitter by the redoubtable Daniel Trilling (@trillingual) and various excellent people in his timeline. It seems like a helpful moment to put the information into a user-friendly form. Some are charities, some are activist non-profits: quite apart from all the people who desperately need help, the official laws, techniques and institutions being developed to police borders and harm refugees and migrants will be quickly be exported to the rest of society, the poor and the vulnerable in particular, the establishment of border-patrol politics at all levels of daily life.
Order is alphabetic, in sections: UK-wide first, then UK local, then a scattering of Europe-wide orgs and some US ones too. Some are self-explanatory, some I’ve given a very brief description. It’s nowhere near exhaustive, obviously — just a start. I’ll probably give it a page of its own shortly — this is just my blog after all — but it seemed the common-sense place to start. If you can, donate or give your time and energy. And circulate this.
UK NATIONAL
Against Borders for Children, against border regimes within schools @Schools_ABC
Association of Visitors to Immigrant Detainees @AVIDdetention
Asylum Aid, @AsylumAid
Asylum Support Appeals Project helps people appeal their cases, get housing, avoid destitution
Bail for Immigration Detainees
Christian/Muslim refugee initiatives, local and national
City of Sanctuary network (UK & Ireland), encouraging communities to welcome refugees, branches nationwide (see below for a few of them) @cityofsanctuary
Counterpoints Arts, engaging with refugee and grant experiences @CounterArts
Detention Action supports people in UK immigration detention @DetentionAction
Doctors of the World: campaigning for refugees in UK to access healthcare, @DOTW_UK
Help Refugees UK @HelpRefugeesUK
Homes Not Borders @Homesnotborders
Homes for Syrians @homesforsyrians
Hope for the Young (formerly OMID International) @hopefortheyoung
Hope not Hate @hopenothate
Housing Rights (not just migrants and refugees)
How to ask your MP to expand UK refugee resettlement
Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants
Lorraine Ayensu Refugee Arts fund @LARAfund
Médecin Sans Frontières @MSF, @MSF_Sea, @MSF_uk
Medical Justice: health rights for UK immigration detainees @MedicalJustice
Migrants’ Law Project offers strategic litigation against immigration detention @MigrantsLawProj
Migrant Voice, for migrant voices to be heard in the UK media @MigrantVoiceUK
Movement for Justice By Any Means Necessary @followMFJ
Music in Detention @MIDdetention
PlatformaArts and Refugee Network @PlatformaArts
Red Cross UK refugee support @britishredcross
Refugee Action @RefugeeAction
Refugees at Home, seeking hosts for refugees and asylum seekers in the UK @RefugeesAtHome,
Refugee Council @refugeecouncil
Safe Passage works to bring vulnerable refugees in Europe to Britain @Safepassageuk
UK Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group @uklgig
We Are Chatterbox: language and cultural training service by refugees @wearechatterbox
Women for Refugee Women campaigns (Yarl’s Wood and elsewhere) @4refugeewomen
Yarl’s Wood Befrienders @YWBefrienders
UK LOCAL
A useful map for local links @RefugeeWeek
London:
Croydon and NW London:
Young Roots: supporting young refugees and asylum seekers @weareyoungroots
East London:
Refugee and Migrant Forum of Essex and London @RAMFELcharity
Greenwich:
Greenwich Migrant Hub @GreenwichMH
Hackney:
Akwaaba social centre for asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants @akwaabahackney
Haringey:
Haringey Migrant Support Centre haringeymsc.org
Islington:
Islington Centre for Refugees and Migrants: English lessons, support, workshops, hot meals @IslingtonCentre
Lewisham:
Action for Refugees in Lewisham @Afril
North East London:
North East London Migrant Action: people left destitute by local council policies @NELMAcampaigns
Walthamstow:
Walthamstow Migrants’ Action Group
London-wide:
English for Action: English lessons in London @EFALondon
New North London Synagogue Drop-In Centre for Destitute Asylum Seekers
Praxis: advice, support, meeting place for migrants and refugees
Refugee Connection: helping refugees and Londoners get to know one another @RefConnection
Support network for people stranded in London by the #MuslimBan
Bradford:
Bradford City of Sanctuary @bradfordCoS
Brighton, Sussex and Surrey:
Brighton Voices in Exile @brightonvoices
Brighton Migrant Solidarity @BriMigSol
Bristol:
Bristol Refugee Rights @bristolrefugeer
Huddersfield:
Destitute Asylum Seekers Huddersfield
Hull:
Hull Help for Refugees @hullforrefugees
Leeds:
Leeds Asylum Seekers Support Network @lassnleeds
Leeds No Borders @leedsnoborders
Positive Action for Refugees and Asylum Seekers @PAFRAS_Leeds
Leicester:
After 18, a resource for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers entering adulthood @after18uk
Liverpool and Merseyside:
Asylum Link @asylumlink
Manchester:
Boaz Trust, serving destitute asylum seekers
Manchester Refugee Support Network
Newcastle:
Action Foundation provides housing and language support @actionFdn
Notts:
Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum @NNRF1
Oxford:
Asylum Welcome @asylumwelcome
Reading:
Reading Refugee Support Group
South Yorkshire:
South Yorkshire Migrants and Asylum Action Group @SYMAAG
Sheffield:
Assist Sheffield: challenging asylum destitution
Tyneside:
Newcastle Law Centre @NewcastleLC
North of England Refugee Service @NERSRefugee
West End Refugee Service
York:
Refugee Action York @refactyork
NORTHERN IRELAND:
Housing4All campaigns against destitution in Belfast @h4allni
Northern Ireland Community of Refugees & Asylum Seekers @NICRAScharity (refugee-led)
Horn of Africa People’s Aid Northern Ireland @HAPANI1 (refugee-led)
SCOTLAND:
Edinburgh:
Edinburgh City of Sanctuary @edinCoS
Welcoming Edinburgh @WelcomingEdi
Refugee Action Scotland: delivering aid to migrants freezing in the Balkans: @re_act_scotland
Glasgow:
Refuweegee: “we’re all fae somewhere”
Glasgow Unity Centre, which monitors and challenges deportations: @unitycentreglas
Positive Action: accommodation for destitute refugees @PositiveActionH
WALES:
Swansea:
Unity in Diversity: helping refugees and asylum seekers @uidswansea
REPUBLIC OF IRELAND:
Migrant Rights Centre Ireland @MigrantRightsIR
Contact your TD to ask them to oppose Trump’s ban
EUROPE
European Council of Refugees and Exiles @ecre
Welcome 2 Europe: information and contact lists country by country
Advice on Individual Rights in Europe @AIRECentre
Refugee Community Kitchen: food for migrants and the homeless in Dunkirk, Paris, Calais, London @RefugeeCkitchen
Refugee Rights Data Project @refugeedata
Red Cross EU @RedCrossEU
Caritas, “the helping hand of the Catholic Church” @iamcaritas
Food for migrants in the Balkans HERE and HERE
Connect Refugee: Phone credit for refugees in Europe, vital lifeline, sometimes literally
UNITED STATES
American Civil Liberties Union @ACLU
Southern Poverty Law Centre @splcenter
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It was called Virtual Space and there was just one issue, “issue zero: place-kicks”. We made less than 20 copies, mostly by hunting round town for a photocopier with an A2 bed. It was an experiment, a mockup for a magazine, and it had no date appearing anywhere on its pages. (But it was early 1989, I’d just quit NME and wasn’t on-staff yet at The Wire.) We were serious: we went looking for funding. The other of the two being designer Paul Elliman, who’d just left The Wire. (Note to self: I haven’t seen Paul in an age and must call him up.)
The media momentum in the mid-80s was very much towards the elective affinity niche: people who took themselves to be anti-system dissenters* had pioneered the communication micro-cluster as a supposed zone of resistance (the indie label, the avant-garde movements, the specialist journal, the theoretico-critical discipline), but the system they declared they were resisting was actually not at all unhappy with this development. Self-balkanised geometries relocate (and quickly muffle) dissent. Freedoms of choice; freedoms of association: knowledge and intelligence arrive and evolve as a consequence — of course — of a degree of unfreedom in both choice and association. There was a knot here, a contradiction inside a conflict inside a conundrum: fuzzily but very strongly, I wanted start from the established reactive niche to push in another, much wider direction, against the encroaching self-quarantine around me; to shake up all the little comfort zones of specialisation. What would a magazine look like that covered everything, from every perspective? What would its production routines and technical shortcuts be? How would this ethos shape its editorial tactics and strategies?
(I should write this whole story up properly. Actually I have been writing it up properly, in the guise of a review of a record no one likes, including me and its makers. Read it when I finish it aka THE INDEFINITE FAR FUTURE dot dot sigh #smh)
Anyway, like Paul I too left The Wire, my project not at all finished — luckily with a few professional skills I could barter into a (much less ambitious) working life. For a decade or so, from c.2000, I had been giving a good part of my time — and surely more significantly my emotional energy — to my parents’ welfare: they were increasingly old and increasingly ill, and I owed them the best of me. Now that this duty is properly discharged, I’ve been returning to the projects of my youth, and wondering again — pretty ludicrously, given all the changes in media and how you get paid — about running some kind of magazine. Knowing full well that I have neither the resources (time/money) nor (in certain basic ways) the temperament, lessons I learnt the hard way the first time round. What should I be doing instead? The internet very much suits my temperament and habits, in good and bad ways. How can I shape these into a thing that’s useful — or anyway beguiling — for others (as I like to believe I briefly did, long ago, in the aftermath of Virtual Space issue zero, which helped get me an editorial role at The Wire).
At a minimum, I’d like to be pointing readers to the various writers that I routinely turn to, and see what transpires. If I could even get people squabbling debating in the comments-threads here, and attract traffic as a consequence of the smell of blood in the water quality of the discussion…
Have fun starting arguments? Light the blue touchpaper and lean in? No: those may have been my mottos at The Wire more than 20 years ago, but I don’t think they helpfully apply any more. Firestarting is hardly the problem on the internet: it’s how to bring together mutually inflammatory material and not set off exhausting flamewars. It’s something patiently grown-up, not something cheekily adolescent. Grown-up but enticing; catching, even. Hmmmm.
Let’s pick a scatter of who I might mean, and you the reader can do the math. Bearing in mind that my attentions will shift from month to month — I read a lot, and I likeread more a lot more than I hateread (though as you’ll see this somewhat means I merely hateread vicaroiously). I’m a magazine journalist: by definition I honour my boredom as hidden critique. If the butterfly-brained refusal to settle is the manifestation of one kind of symptom, incessant re-appearance at the same spot is another. This would be a very rough sketch of a possible ground; let’s just say that, and not pay attention to the clangour of everything that isn’t here.
• Marcello Carlin (here being nice about me). We are pals, of course. Whatever the thing is that I’m building, it can’t be hostile to fellowship or intimacy; and so must take into account the issues that can arise from this.
• Frank Kogan: here with an oldie that adverts to a tradition of writing and thinking which is not so distant from what I have in mind. Aside from the late Richard Cook, the two figures whose aesthetic I most wanted to fuse at The Wire (or clatter against each other, as a way to talk about all kinds of music) were Greil Marcus and Frank. I wasn’t really there long enough (and also hadn’t entirely had my head round Frank’s thinking, I suspect).
• Seth Edenbaum, and a PDF of a work-in-progress. In some form this should already have been a published book (for several years). As with Marcello and Frank, a friend — and I feel a slight squirmy degree of embarassment that I’ve haven’t been able to do more to draw proper attention to his work, and to him. I used to be good at this; or at least, I once briefly had a platform I hoped to do this kind of broadcasting with. Which some people remember fondly.
(Already we possibly recognise an underlying question: what is wrong with the cultural world we face, that these three are all basically outlier minds, their marginality less a function of their own often daunting rigour than of the failure of what — further up — I termed the routines and shortcuts and tactics and strategies of editorial practice and production?)
Plus some more (rather younger) names: outsider I’d guess more by choice than unspoken decree.
• Alex Harrowell, the Yorkshire Ranter.
• That Tasmanian Devil of prose Hazel Robinson (who is also my extremely close friend off the net as well as on).
• isabelthespy, writing a streak on Britney just before xmas.
And for now I’m stopping at just six. Because I’m imagining even just these guys in a room, debating I don’t know what, and I can no longer hear myself think >:D >:D >:D Though the project would certainly also include the blog I started with Tallita Dyllen, if we work out a way to encompass doing it while living in London and Beirut respectively; and any material that Victoria DeRijke writes, once she frees herself from the horrible clutches of academia. sadface emoticon.
I’d only want to do it — but do what? I literally have no idea how to realise this practicably — if it could be a space bending towards curiosity, generosity, mischief and so on. Is it doable? Is it something you’d like to see, or be part of?
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Quick unedited notes the morning after (on just 4 hrs sleep)
1: the road-testing of the citizens united decision has not developed entirely to the 1%’s advantage
2: TRUMPBOT SMASH *trumpbot falls over on face in puddle of someone else’s vomit*
3: no one ever got rich betting against the continued stupidity of the US pundit class, but — and usually like emerson I am pro creative-transformative intuition and against the soulless bead-counting technocrat where’er he be — but Team Silver has surely helped ding the the current pundit-layer’s crappy jalopy, in a way that a mere unpredicted shock dem win would not have done
4: ratfuck report (relevant internal repug warfare): husted knew — because he could see on his master screen, the one with the knob that technologically flipped the votes — that ohio was gone beyond critical *before* the point where technological vote-flipping could be brought in to save the day; he told the Fox deciders and went home; he pointedly didn’t tell rove bcz FUCK TURDBLOSSOM
First posted at Unfogged, further thoughts at B&T (I had Caro on LBJ in mind here, and the fact that many voting machine companies are Repub-owned): note the Ranter’s response, in particular — my takeaway — the fact that all you need to depress the other guy’s voting (and voters) is for your claim to hold all the cards to be plausible. The loss of this plausibility can be the puncture in the balloon: the hole is small but it doesn’t self-heal. To over-estimate the scope of their control — I think of this as an anarchist failing, but that may just be my age and prejudice showing — is very much to hobble our own options.
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Entirely unsurprisingly, the word ‘troll’ now has a politicised range of meanings—all the way from anonymous internet bully to subtly provocative dialectician, with a fractally wriggly continuum linking these extremes—and the comment this is a response to (a) made it reasonably clear which meaning one s/he had in mind* and thus (b) deserved a better (or at least more self-aware) answer than “By using the word X you can only be saying Y about me and I know myself well enough to say this is false.” Of course dsquared was trolling here — and it’s not as if Farrell is historically that good at identifying the motivations of the people he deems trolls by his own over-simplified (which is to say self-exculpatory) definition. The revealed fact of the faultline is an indication that people on both sides are uneasily (=angrily) aware that they too exist within contradiction: “just a lot less so than those OTHER deluded clowns,” the more twerpish partisans on both sides are busy telling themselves.
*And yes, s/he later disappointingly backed away from a good strong usage…
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