About the Refugee Council

Founded in 1951, the Refugee Council exists to support people who come to the UK in need of safety and our purpose is to advocate with them for compassion, fairness and kindness. We achieve this by providing expert advice and casework, building the capacity of refugee community organisations, and working with allies across society to change government policy.

The Refugee Council is one of the leading organisations in the UK working with refugees and people seeking asylum.

Learn more about the Refugee Council here

About the Community Engagement Team

Refugee Community Organisations (RCOs) provide vital support services to their communities. They constitute a unique and undervalued civil society asset, rich with lived experience as a result of having volunteers, staff and trustees from a refugee background themselves.

The Community Engagement Team’s work focuses on creating a thriving and resilient population of RCOs with a strong voice and with the capacity to respond effectively to the needs of their communities and ability to transform refugees’ experience of seeking asylum in UK.

This is a small team which is part of the Refugee Council’s Refugee Involvement team. This team provides capacity building support to RCOs, amplifying their voice through the work of the London Refugee Advocacy Forum, and facilitate their engagement with stakeholders.

Volunteers in this role will support the Community Engagement manager to ensure that services provided by RCOs are well known by various stakeholders, that RCOs receive valuable information about the support available to them and that stakeholders internal as well as external can communicate and engage with RCOs and reach their clients.

About this role

The volunteer would be expected to carry out a short piece of desk-based research to collect data and then provide an analysis of the results to develop a better understanding of RCO services available to refugees and asylum seekers and to update our directory of RCOs.

We are looking to map current service provision by RCOs, and to identify the impact of the worsening of the funding environment on refugee community organisations.

We also want to improve communication and engagement between RCOs and refugee integration stakeholders, to enable RCOs to know each other better, share experience and resources, promote their work and celebrate success.

What could I be doing?

• Compile and distribute an e-survey to RCOs asking specific questions about their services
• Contact RCOs who do not respond to the e-survey by telephone to gain responses
• To undertake literature reviews where necessary, collate evidence and analyse the findings and write a short report outlining the key findings.
• Use the e-survey results and contribute to the development of a directory of services provided by RCOs in England.
• Contributing to the publication of RCO Connect, an electronic newsletter dedicated to providing information to RCOs. This work will include promoting the newsletter to RCOs, drafting articles profiling RCOs and helping them to use the newsletter to share experience and resources, to promote their work and to celebrate success.

Useful skills and experience

• Interest in community capacity building, specifically supporting and engaging with refugee community organisations
• Good communication skills, both written and oral
• Ability to elicit relevant information via phone and one-to-one interviews and summarise relevant parts
• Word processing and spreadsheet skills.
• The ability to analyse data and draw basic conclusions
• Attention to detail and the ability to work well both independently and as part of a team

Time commitment

1-2 days per week (flexible)

You can learn more about this role by downloading our task description here [DOC].

You can apply for this role using this application form [DOCX] .

Interested? Contact Ezechias Ngendahayo at ezechias.ngendahayo@refugeecouncil.org.uk for more information.