Summary: <br> Welcome!<br> <br> <br> <br> Welcome to the Refugee Voices Scotland podcast. This episode features The Welcoming Association in Edinburgh whose mission is to “Welcome newcomers, build community and learn together”. I spoke to Adil Ibrahim who is a Senior Community Development Practitioner to learn about the range of services they provide. <br> <br> <br> <br> -0-<br> <br> <br> <br> Transcript<br> <br> <br> <br> Welcome to the Refugee voices Scotland podcast my name is Ken Gordon. Today we’re in a magnificently echoey place with Adil Ibrahim who is a community development practitioner at the Welcoming Association, hello Adil.<br> <br> <br> <br> A: Hello<br> <br> <br> <br> K: It’s a beautiful day, it has been sunny and raining every 5 or 10 minutes. Scottish.<br> <br> <br> <br> A: Typically Scottish<br> <br> <br> <br> K: Adil, can you tell me something about the Welcoming Association because it is a very Edinburgh-centric organisation<br> <br> <br> <br> A: It is Edinburg-centric. It is a grassroots organisation, established in the early 2000s. The main thing that we do here at The Welcoming is to provide English language classes at different levels. <br> <br> <br> <br> We have the beginners classes, pre-intermediate, intermediate, advanced – in addition to that, we run a conversation cafe every Friday. People come to us from different countries – over 60 different nationalities come to The Welcoming, and we attract over 1300 people annually to come here and learn English. So that’s our main operation and has been like that for a long time. <br> <br> <br> <br> On top of that, we run other projects. For example, the project I’m working on is called the Welcoming a Greener Future project which is funded by CCF, the Climate Challenge Fund from the Scottish government. It is administered by Keeping Scotland Beautiful. We have been in receipt of that funding for the last 5 years and we’re very grateful to our funders because that money is allowing us to do magnificent work in the community, to raise awareness about climate change and to encourage people to take action to tackle climate change.<br> <br> <br> <br> K: Ok before we talk about that, coming back to the English, how many people part in the classes?<br> <br> <br> <br> A: We run 17 different classes a week and on average it is about 20 people in each class.<br> <br> <br> <br> So annually as I said earlier, about 1300 people come to our classes.<br> <br> <br> <br> K: 60 countries<br> <br> <br> <br> A: From over 60 countries. Mainly Europeans. We did research recently and Italians and Spanish are the majority of our participants. However, a couple of years ago we started to engage with the Syrian refugees through the City of Edinburgh Council’s Syrian resettlement programme. We are partners in that Programme, and therefore we do work with a lot of Syrians. They are coming here to learn English or enjoying other activities to help them integrate into the community. So we have you been in the fortunate position to be partners in that work.<br> <br> <br> <br> K: is it quite a mixed group? Is it both male and female?<br> <br> <br> <br> A: It’s male and female. Over eighteen. We don’t work with children at the moment although we are looking into that. But so far we work with adults 18 plus.<br> <br> <br> <br> K: How long do the courses last for English? Does it continue for years?<br> <br> <br> <br> A: It is drop-in. Drop-in classes. So people can come for a month or two months or six months, so it’s very very flexible. Unlike colleges, we are not fixed with a specific course that you need to complete to the end. So it’s the drop-in nature that actually attracts people to us. People don’t feel obliged to stick to a course because as you know people,
