We are delighted to have been able to provide a grant of £5,000 towards this project. 

The Home from Home Club is a drop-in for asylum seekers resident at the OYO Hotel. It is held at Finchley Progressive Synagogue after school on Tuesdays.  It offers a warm welcome, fresh food, a place to sit and chat, craft activities and outdoor play for children and an opportunity to simply be somewhere other than the hotel for a couple of hours.

After initial pilot sessions, it has been running weekly since October 2023 with an established volunteer team, including a number of teenagers and young adults who are particularly popular with the children.  The excellent kitchen team do a wonderful job catering to account for considerable fluctuations in attendance. It’s also experimenting with having guests cook a dish.

Attendance has averaged 35 people a week, with 19 at the smallest and 64 at the largest session, which shows an increased need for activities in the school holidays.

The club could run until the end of 2023 but importantly our funding has enabled them to continue in 2024.

There has been some turnover recently with residents at the hotel, in consequence of the Home Office’s efforts to clear the backlog of historic asylum claims before the end of 2023.  This has resulted in a spate of families receiving their refugee status and being evicted from the hotel, to be replaced by new families from outside London.  Another national change that has had a significant impact on residents is that the Home Office has REDUCED asylum support from £9.58 per person per week to £8.86 per person per week.

Many return week after week, but they also continue to get new guests at almost every session.  There has been an increase in adult men and older boys attending the Club including fathers and brothers of families who have been coming for a long time. They provide board games like chess and backgammon which are popular.

They successfully applied for 100 6-month Vodaphone SIMcards, and demand was higher than anticipated, as the data is particularly needed by teenaged children for their schoolwork, and they will be applying for more.

It is now a registered referral partner for Sebby’s Corner, an excellent local charity which provides baby equipment, toys and clothes to expectant mothers and families with young children.  This process is cumbersome and they have made 15 referrals in the last three months, and some attend specifically for this.  They also provide sign-posting other support for expectant and new mothers and have welcomed several new babies to the club.

It offers informal ESOL practice sessions, but many of the adults who come to the Club are already enrolled in college classes and they prefer to come to relax and chat instead. However, a great deal of informal English language practice does go on.

Although not set up for advice and casework, they do provide support with problems. For example:

  • A family has been supported by one of the volunteers who is an experienced primary school teacher and has attended school meetings with them. This has led to putting in place a structured plan for a child which initially reduced their hours at school and has led to increased school attendance and improved behaviour.  The child is much happier and this has also had a positive impact on the mental health of the mother.
  • At a recent session, the older brother of a secondary school child asked for our help to explain how they could replace a lost ZIP card. In the course of the conversation, it became clear that the older sibling was not aware that he was himself eligible for a 16+ Zip card entitling him to half-price travel – which makes a lot of difference if you are getting by on just £8.86 a week!

It has seen Club members grow in confidence, and participate in taking action to represent themselves and their needs and campaign for change. An OYO resident addressed a meeting of 200 people at a mosque in Whitechapel about the cost of bus travel.  In consequence, London Citizens is now engaged in a London-wide campaign for free bus travel for asylum seekers in London in the run-up to the mayoral campaign.  OYO residents documented their food and provided evidence of the impact of food quality on their health and campaigned to improve hotel food.  Residents of all five hotels in Barnet attended and spoke at a meeting in November with Council Leader Barry Rawlings, Cabinet member Councillor Zahra Beg and council officers resulting now in regular meetings convened by a council officer between hotel managers, Barnet public health officers and representatives of local charities specifically to work on food quality in the hotels and the North Central London Health and Care Partnership is gathering information on patterns of health concerns among hotel residents.

We applaud all those involved with The Home from Home Club for both their dedication and contribution to a worthwhile and vital cause. Well done and we’re pleased we can also have helped. Thanks!