Background

Pos­i­tive Action for Refugees and Asy­lum Seek­ers (PAFRAS) was founded in 2003 as a locally-based human­i­tar­ian response to the Home Office’s pol­icy of dis­pers­ing asy­lum appli­cants through­out the UK, to areas with lit­tle or no expe­ri­ence of deal­ing with and sup­port­ing refugees. Orig­i­nally called Pos­i­tive Action for Refugees; the project has grown sig­nif­i­cantly over the years in response to the grow­ing needs of refugees and asy­lum seek­ers in Leeds and the sur­round­ing area. Over this period our work has become more and more focused on car­ing for the large num­bers of refused asy­lum seek­ers in and around Leeds who are made des­ti­tute as a result of gov­ern­ment policy.

PAFRAS Ser­vice Fig­ures 2006–2011 (click to enlarge)

In 2005, as a response to this emerg­ing cri­sis, PAFRAS opened a twice-weekly drop-in at which, with the help of our many sup­port­ers and donors, we pro­vide food parcels, hot meals, clothes, and toi­letries. Since open­ing, we have seen the num­bers of des­ti­tute asy­lum seek­ers attend­ing the drop-in dra­mat­i­cally increase. We cur­rently receive nearly 600 vis­its each month.

Dur­ing 2009 PAFRAS received 6,466 vis­its from des­ti­tute asy­lum seek­ers at its drop-in cen­tres, and pro­vided 1,817 one-to-one sup­port ses­sions with spe­cialised staff. In the same period we also pro­vided 5,557 hot meals, 3,849 food parcels, 566 toi­letries packs, thou­sands of items of cloth­ing and many, many blankets.

2010 saw a marked increase in take up of our ser­vices, demon­strat­ing both an increased aware­ness of PAFRAS amongst (poten­tial) ser­vice users and per­haps increas­ing num­bers of des­ti­tute asy­lum seek­ers in the city. This trend is on-going so far in 2011.

In recog­ni­tion of the fact that this urgent human­i­tar­ian aid can only be of lim­ited help in the long term we simul­ta­ne­ously pro­vide expe­ri­enced case and men­tal health work­ers to offer one-to-one sup­port, infor­ma­tion and assis­tance to those who attend while also work­ing to pro­mote social jus­tice through research based inter­ven­tions and analysis.

PAFRAS pro­vides vital ser­vices in con­strained cir­cum­stances with lim­ited fund­ing. You can help us by vol­un­teer­ing with us or by mak­ing a dona­tion.