Associate feature: Collaborating on refugee integration

Scotland is known for providing a warm, supportive welcome to refugees and asylum seekers helping them to rebuild their lives and contribute to their new communities, but did you know that National Lottery funding has played a huge part in making that happen?

Since 2010, the Big Lottery Fund in Scotland has awarded £6m to 107 projects that have strengthened resilience and self-reliance among refugee communities. Of everything we have funded, from Scotland wide strategic initiatives to local community based projects, each one has begun from a place of positivity, focussing on the skills, assets and energy that people bring to their new communities.

The launch of the New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy (2018-2022) earlier this year prompted my colleagues and I to reflect on of some of the pivotal moments that our funding has helped to make possible.

We have been proud to work with the Scottish Refugee Council (SRC) for many years now. As early as 2008, we awarded SRC £944,543 for activity that included a study of refugee integration in Scotland. This study became a vital piece of work that helped to secure a commitment by the Scottish Government to the first national refugee integration strategy 2014-2017.

As the study concluded we invested half a million pounds in the SRC‘s Guardianship Project, a pilot for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in Scotland which became statutory funded – a great example of mainstreaming in action, thanks to National Lottery funding.

Thereafter with a £2m award, the SRC developed the Holistic Integration Service which provided 2,000 newly-recognised refugees in Scotland with a wide range of advice, advocacy and support around housing, health, employment, benefits and education. Its Scottish Refugee Integration Service was borne from this, and the learning from both programmes and has since informed refugee integration practice in both the UK and Europe.

But of course, it’s not just our work with SRC that has seen National Lottery funding supporting refugees and asylum seekers. For example, in Edinburgh the Welcoming Association is using an award of £142,079 to run a befriending project providing one to one support to newly arrived migrants and refugees. Meanwhile in Glasgow, the Mental Health Foundation is focussing on the health and wellbeing of refugee and asylum seekers, thanks to a grant of £150,000.

We are proud that the seeds of our National Lottery investment have influenced public policy refugee integration in Scotland and beyond. But more importantly we’re proud of all of those organisations that we have funded who together are leading the way as a beacon for how refugees should be supported to begin their new lives here in Scotland.

Martin Cawley is Scotland Director of the Big Lottery Fund Scotland

Sponsored by Big Lottery Fund Scotland