The Boaz Trust

So, following Medair I'm now working for the Boaz Trust. The Boaz Trust is a Christian NGO which aims to meet the needs of asylum seekers suffering destitution and hardship in the Manchester area.

Immigration and asylum are contentious issues wherever you go in the Western world. To give you some idea of the problems here in the UK, we have about 3000 failed asylum seekers in Manchester alone. For London, you could probably multiply that figure by at least 10.

Asylum seekers are people fleeing persecution and violence in their home countries. The people we meet here in Manchester come from various places on the African continent, DR Congo, Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia, as well parts of the Middle East and the Far East, such as Iran and Afghanistan. They often arrive via Southern Europe, and many have taken huge risks to get here.

When asylum seekers arrive the UK, they are initially supported by the Government. Many of their applications for asylum are rejected, and these people then have no recourse to any public funds. The consequence is that some do become homeless living on the streets, others are helped in their communities, will find a sofa or a floor to sleep on. There are so many of these people now here that the government is incapable of either supporting or deporting them, often they don't have any travel documentation and their home countries will not accept them anyway.

So, i guess if you've read this far, the asylum issue is a complex one and my role as the Programme Manager is a demanding one. I'd suggest reading the Boaz website if you want a more in depth view of what we do, but in brief we resource Churches and Christians around the city to help run a housing and hosting system, we are running an advocacy project to assist many of their clients with their cases, and we run several social programmes to try and provide holistic care for our clients.

OK, so some of you may be reading this and be thinking that some of these asylum seekers probably don't have a genuine case, and are simply seeking a better life in the UK, and I'd be the first to admit you are right. With the development of advocacy and legal expertise, Boaz are getting better at identifying these situations when clients first come to us for help.

Boaz are serving some of the most rejected and despised people in our society, and in reaching out to such a forgotten group of people, hopefully we are showing something of Jesus to all the people we meet. I'll update you more soon on how the role with Boaz is developing. Bye for now