A welcome from our Patron, Ali Smith

When Anna asked me if I’d be a patron to the project I said an immediate yes and a big thank-you for asking me. The most heartening work I did last year was the work I did with Refugee Tales, and the highpoint of my year was the night I came to Charing to meet and read with the walkers.

Late last year too I was in the audience at an event in London featuring the great writer and cultural visionary John Berger. Someone in the audience asked him what he thought we could do about the movement of people across the world and the reactions of countries to those who arrive in them seeking help and refuge. He sat and thought in silence for a moment or two. Then he began to talk about storytelling.

The telling of stories is an act of profound hospitality. It always has been; story is an ancient form of generosity, an ancient form that will tell us everything we need to know about the contemporary world. Story has always been a welcoming-in, is always one way or another a hospitable meeting of the needs of others, and a porous artform where sympathy and empathy are only the beginning of things. The individual selves we all are meet and transform in the telling into something open and communal.

Imagine if every city, if every country, greeted refugees with signs which said in many languages the word welcome, and the words you are safe, like Vienna did last summer.

We will tell it like it is, and we will work towards the better imagined.
Welcome to this year’s Refugee Tales.

Ali Smith

Ali Smith’s ‘The Detainee’s Tale’ is available on the Guardian website.

About Refugee Tales

A Walk In Solidarity with Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Detainees

Since 2015, Refugee Tales walkers have made a large scale walk every summer In solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers and people who have been held in immigration detention. Walkers have been met with hospitality every step of the way. Working in collaboration with migrants and those who have experienced the UK asylum system, and taking Chaucer’s great poem of journeying as a model, established writers and people with lived experience of detention have shared tales in evening events.

The tales are published in five volumes by Comma Press. Through the sharing of tales the project has gathered and communicated experiences of migration, and has sought to show the reality of indefinite detention. As the project walks it creates a space in which the language of welcome is the prevailing discourse.

Since Refugee Tales walked for the first time, the debate around human movement has fluctuated dramatically, as pressure for a change of policy on indefinite detention has continued to build. It is a cruel and debilitating practice that continues to do untold damage to tens of thousands of lives.

Refugee Tales hosts a self-advocacy project for people with lived experience of detention who share the tales with parliamentarians and people of influence and calls for change. We are very grateful to all those who have shared their stories, to the writers, musicians and hosts who have worked with us. Thank you, walkers and thank you to our patrons, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Ali Smith.

About Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group

Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group started in 1995 when people were detained at a small holding centre near Gatwick Airport. The following year, Tinsley House Immigration Removal Centre was built, and we became a registered charity. Our vision is for a society where people whose right to live in the UK is being questioned are treated with humanity and justice by all. Our mission is to improve the welfare and well-being of people affected by the immigration detention system through friendship, support and advocacy for fair treatment while calling for positive change and an end to indefinite immigration detention.

A second detention facility at Gatwick, Brook House, opened in March 2009. Brook House operates alongside Tinsley House, and both centres are currently run by Serco. GDWG supports people held in both centres.

GDWG has around 70 volunteers, who befriend people in detention through weekly visits. The Group believes that each person in detention has a right to be treated with respect and humanity. We have a small number of staff who co-ordinate the volunteer team and provide support and advocacy to those detained.

We use our insights into the experience of detention to try to improve conditions, inform policy and challenge negative attitudes towards people who are indefinitely detained. We work with a network of other organisations who help those in detention such as the Association for Visitors to Immigration Detainees (AVID), the Detention Monitoring Group and Detention Forum.

Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group website is here

Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group is a Registered Charity in England and Wales, Number 1124328

Our commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion

We wish GDWG and our outreach work through Refugee Tales to imagine better: a society where everyone feels safe, where everyone has agency and possibility, free from inequality, and free from the fear of prejudice and hate. We wish to address the inherent power imbalance in our work, and we wish to improve representation and lived experience across our organisation. We have formulated our next five-year strategic plan and equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) is central to our future planning. We wish to look with fresh eyes at the values we hold dear and ensure that anti-racist and anti-oppressive practice is expressed and enacted in the best possible way throughout every aspect of our work.

This message on our website is a statement of our intent and our commitment to learn, discuss and act. We have started a process of training within our organisation to understand the oppressions that people experience and our new EDI working group will lead our learning, conversations and action. What we do, who does it and how we do it are crucial for us to understand. We make clear, today, our commitment to explore how lack of equity has an impact on our whole community. Are you an expert by experience, a GDWG visitor, trustee, a Refugee Tales walker or formerly detained person, and would you like to be part of our EDI working group? Please let us know.

Thanks to everyone who is on this journey with us and to the external agencies who have already helped us on our way and to those we are currently connecting with as we formulate our training, plan our equalities audit, and listen, learn and imagine better together.

Our new strategic plan is linked here.