Portsmouth City of Sanctuary (PCoS) is a local charity celebrating after being awarded £223,000 in National Lottery funding to support their humanitarian work helping local asylum seekers, refugees and migrants in Portsmouth. Their Refugee Hub based at All Saints Church, Commercial Road, will use the money for the Portsmouth Migrant & Refugee Support (PMRS) project. It will sustain and extend their essential service delivery to 1500+ refugees, asylum seekers, vulnerable migrants, and dependents, annually.
PCoS has been running since 2019, staffed by nearly 40 volunteers and 4 self-employed project leaders, was founded by Malcolm Little, Shamila Dhana and Denise Callender after working together alongside other city organisations for Journeys Festival. They realised that the sanctuary seeking community was struggling with issues regarding claiming asylum and that refugees felt unconnected to locals in Portsmouth. With Malcolm and Shamila’s previous experience working with sanctuary seekers, they pulled together their knowledge and understanding to set up support for local asylum seekers, refugees and migrant families.
The charity now operates a range of projects including orientation casework that provides signposting to key services, English lessons, integration and wellbeing activities, open to all sanctuary seekers and migrants in Portsmouth.
PCoS works with several partner organisations to help run their service, such as CAP, Baby Basics, Aspex, Parenting Network and SCD, who make visits to the Refugee Hub on Monday mornings. As the popularity of the Refugee Hub grew, with more people arriving suffering trauma seeking help, the next stage of development for the charity became vital.
The new funding available from 1st April from The National Lottery Community Fund, which distributes money raised by National Lottery players for good causes and is the largest community funder in the UK, will allow PCoS to employ a full time PMRS Project Manager and two further part time roles, to focus on improving and strengthening the Refugee Hub service. This means that the number of sanctuary seekers participating in the service can increase up to 2000 per annum sustainably.
At the same time, the charity will be able to fund better help for vulnerable women with No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) in emergency situations. These women are often victims of gender violence.
Malcolm Little, chair of trustees, says: “We’re delighted that The National Lottery Community Fund has recognised our work in this way. Now, thanks to National Lottery players we will be able to press on with our plans to broaden the range of opportunities available to sanctuary seekers and migrants who need our help. This is important because public funds do not stretch to the help integrate people we support into the community. It will also help sanctuary seekers to build relationships with others facing similar challenges, give them the opportunity to volunteer with us, and to meet local residents of Portsmouth who can make them feel at home.”
The National Lottery Community Fund recently launched its new strategy, ‘It starts with community’, which will underpin its efforts to distribute at least £4 billion of National Lottery funding by 2030.
As part of this, the funder has four key missions, which are to support communities to come together, be environmentally sustainable, help children and young people thrive and enable people to live healthier lives.
National Lottery players raise over £30 million a week for good causes across the UK. Thanks to them, last year The National Lottery Community Fund was able to distribute over half a billion pounds (£615.4 million) of life-changing funding to communities.
To find out more visit www.TNLCommunityFund.org.uk
