We are delighted to announce that RAIS Lancaster has been awarded substantial National Lottery funding over 3 years by The National Lottery Community Fund.
We started back in 2017 as a volunteer-led group to support asylum seekers and refugees in Lancaster. Over the last several years, we have grown and adapted to offer necessary advocacy to those we are honoured to support in our area. We offer three drop-ins a week alongside our partner organisations, one-to-one appointments Monday to Friday, accompanying to hospital/GP/council/Home Office appointments, and translation in our drop-ins from our incredible volunteers. We are proud to be volunteer-led and to be made up of an incredible team of people from all over the world.
RAIS Lancaster is entering its next chapter to meet the demand for our services and to continue being a welcoming, reliable place for asylum seekers and refugees in Lancaster and Morecambe as we support them on their journeys to becoming settled after so much upheaval and trauma.
With the grant from the National Lottery, RAIS will be hiring a new part-time support worker. This will give us the capacity to become registered and qualified to give legal advice on asylum and immigration – something so desperately needed when Legal Aid solicitors can’t meet the demand for their services. We will also be able to increase our outreach, collaborate further with our partner organisations, and offer more volunteer supervision and training.
We will be keeping you updated on all of the above and thank you to everyone who makes RAIS’s work possible; to all of our volunteers, every asylum-seeking and refugee translators who make our drop-ins possible, our staff, trustees, partner organisations, and donors.
And a massive thank you to the National Lottery and every National Lottery player; they make charities like RAIS able to expand their services to help everyone who needs them.
Here’s to a future of continued community, advocacy, and solidarity. Refugees remain welcome here!