Hi all! Just sharing this call-out from Roula Kheder Alsheikh at Routes Collective - Routes is a fantastic CIC offering training, access to workshops and professional development, and mentor/mentee opportunities to refugee and asylum-seeking women in the UK.
In May 2023, Routes Collective started a research based project aiming to understand and analyse the problem of unemployment rate in the women refugee community in London. We ran co-production workshops with lived experience women, a survey and individual calls with partner organisations. The goal was to identify the barriers and challenges which women are facing with seeking employment in order to design a pilot project which will address some of findings.
At this point, Routes are keen to chat with businesses about what may be some of the actual and/or potential challenges that may face refugee and asylum seekers gaining employment opportunities in UK, from the perspective of businesses. We’d love to hear whether employing refugees and asylum seekers has ever been something that interested the business, or was on your radar even. Crucially, if not, it’s so valuable to learn more about this, as it will really support us to build solutions for the future. This is a bit of a blind spot for us, to understand what may be a priority surrounding hiring within your sector. We’d love to deepen our understanding and would value a supportive sounding board at this stage of the project.
If this sounds interesting to, please feel free to get in touch with Roula on roula@routescollective.com