Finding free social activities for refugees and asylum seekers in Leeds – July 24

By Jon from LASSN on 12th July 2024 in Resource

Regular readers will know the challenge of keeping up with all the social activities across Leeds that welcome refugees and asylum seekers. And despite the best efforts of LCC and third sector partners, activities in Asylum Hotels are extremely limited and a lot of people are very very bored.

Along with the core drop-ins and long-standing services and groups for asylum seekers and refugees, there are many other activity groups across Leeds: from healthy eating and cooking groups to sport and leisure activities and environmental and historical societies. Some of these groups have a refugee focus, but many do not – even though they welcome and support people from all backgrounds.

In the past, we’ve tried using websites, apps, padlets, and all sorts to keep track of them, and every attempt has failed. All our schedules and timetables have gone out of date very quickly indeed.

So this time, we’re sharing an old-fashioned document with hyperlinks. This requires users to do a bit more work to find what they are after, but it also means this resource is less likely to go out of date.

A great example is the recent list of activities published by the Orion Group of Services(see left hand side), which describes 40 activities in Inner East Leeds arranged by subject and day of the week. We’ve linked straight to it because it’s a lot of work to reproduce these listings in a new format, but updating the next timetable (which will come out in October) is a small job.

Similarly, Mindwell’s list of Wellbeing Activities is so comprehensive and well-curated that we figured it was easier to remind people that it exists, rather than reproduce its content. Be sure to have a look at the huge range of activities they list there.

Here is the list of activities we use at Leeds Asylum Seekers Support Network; we encourage you to share it as widely as possible.

No list is ever complete, so if you know of any activities that need to be included or amended, please email [email protected] with their details and we’ll try to include them.