25th October 2021

This autumn, we were delighted to make a film about Porridge & Play Online as one of 13 Stories of Resilience commissioned by Refugee Action.

Working on Zoom has produced a wealth of wonderful video clips of Porridge & Play Online throughout the Pandemic. Lead Actor-pedagogue, Iona Zajac, was able to cherry-pick from these in order to edit together a 5-minute film to provide a window into the essence of this amazing project. The narration, recorded by Storyplay Champion children, draws on child consultation sessions to capture what the project has meant for them.

We were delighted to be able to share our families’ experiences of Storyplay during the pandemic, alongside such an important group of projects.

People who succeed in getting to the UK to claim asylum against the odds have already shown great resilience and courage, but faced with our brutal Asylum system, their sense of relief and hope can often be short-lived.

Watch the film here

The Home Office needs to do much more to meet the material needs of people seeking asylum. The basic human rights to food, shelter, clothes, school, digital access and transport are not sufficiently met and many charities do vital work to fill the gaps.

The pressure of these needs also has a huge impact on mental health and wellbeing – in limbo, isolated and disempowered, anxious, overwhelmed, bereft of family and friends and often also traumatised.  That’s why it is also so important we meet people’s need for a sense of self-worth, intrinsic human value, self-respect, sense of possibility and human connection.

This is what I believe the Stories of Resilience project is about.

It’s about finding ways to nurture and befriend refugees and people seeking asylum. And creating opportunities for them to be seen, heard, respected, recognised, loved and valued for who they are. It’s about giving them opportunities to rebuild their resilience, sense of self-worth, possibility and hope.

For Licketyspit, resilience is not about masking problems, it’s about nurturing survival and the capacity to thrive and connect. That’s what we do in Storyplay, a way of playing together which is all about who we are – not what we do or don’t have. And about reciprocity, as human beings of equal value who need each other to thrive and survive.

Stories of Resilience is a UK-wide storytelling project celebrating how UK community organisations and people in the immigration system got through the pandemic, together. These stories were pitched by recipients of RAP funding – the Respond and Adapt Programme established by Migration Exchange, NACCOM and Refugee Action in April 2020 and funded by the AB Charitable Trust, Barrow Cadbury Trust, Comic Relief, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, Migration Foundation, Blue Thread, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, The Rayne Foundation, Unbound Philanthropy and Lloyds Bank Foundation.