Everyone Invited to Celebrate our Communities on Saturday 18th June

By Lucille Smith

Since taking on my role as Community Development Lead for the Trust I have been working with the Bristol Refugee Festival to bring together all our communities in North Bristol.

I am delighted to announce that, for the second year running, we are co-hosting a Celebrating Sanctuary event as part of the city-wide Bristol Refugee Festival 2022.  It’s at the Greenway Centre on Saturday 18^th June from 11am til 3pm, and everyone is invited to enjoy music, food, games and activities good for the soul.

The theme for the city-wide Festival this year is ‘Healing’.  The organisers tell us:

“This year, we invite you to explore the theme of healing and how this might be done through activity that creates strong, welcoming and inclusive communities. 

“Healing means the process of making or becoming sound or healthy again. This process is made much easier if we have support and care from others. All of us will have experienced injury or loss at some point in our lives and know how important family, friends, and neighbours are for helping ease the pain and begin healing again. Refugees and asylum seekers arriving in the UK will have lost those strong networks and connections, so together we need to help them rebuild new ones, so they can feel welcome, safe, valued and so begin to heal”.

Last year our residents came together in Southmead at The Ranch for a lovely, Covid-safe event to celebrate the many communities of Southmead.  The Sudanese community treated us to singing, fabulous cake and strong coffee, and all the kids had a whale of a time on the play equipment.  Everyone agreed that there are many more different communities in Southmead than we realised and that this event, which brought us all together, was long overdue.

I am so proud this year that we are hosting an even bigger celebration at our larger Greenway Centre venue (so we can accommodate more people) and I can’t wait to see everyone enjoying all the different things on offer.  This will include performance, workshops, dance, and, of course, delicious food for all the family.

We need to make sure we have the right numbers for catering so please let me know you’re coming by clicking > Here

Absolutely everyone is invited and welcome, and if you want to help out on the day then I’d love to hear from you, email: lucillesmith@southmead.org, tel: 0117 950 3335.

Find out more and see the listings for all city-wide events here > Bristol Refugee Festival

Below, last year at The Ranch