ACH Bristol celebrates Refugee Week
As part of the UK-wide Refugee Week and global initiative of World Refugee Day, Bristol also hosts its own month-long celebration ‘Bristol Refugee Festival’ to recognise and celebrate the contribution refugees make to the city. Each year, ACH takes this opportunity to run events for our tenants, staff and the public to join in with the festivities and reinforce our #rethinkingrefugee message, and this year was no different. In total we took part in 4 Bristol Refugee Festival events.
ACH Bike Ride
Our annual Bristol Refugee Festival bike ride is starting to become a tradition with ACH staff and tenants. This year a group of 15 set off from Easton Business Centre, where we cycled along the Bristol to Bath cycle path towards Saltford.
The day couldn’t have been any better as we had the perfect combination of beautiful weather, a scenic setting, great company and a delicious BBQ. Once we arrived at our chosen BBQ area, we all enjoyed food and relaxing by the canal together. Thank you to everyone who joined us for this special day!
ACH 10 Year Party
This year we are celebrating 10 years of ACH! As part of Bristol Refugee Festival we had a party for this milestone birthday with our tenants, learners, staff and people from the local community. The party was held at Barton Hill Settlement and we were overwhelmed by the turnout to our event, with the room full of new and old faces.
Food was served up by Food Without Borders and was delicious with homemade curries, rice and dips for everyone to dig into. Everyone also got together and had a dance to some great music. We were honoured to share our birthday with everyone who came, so a big thank you to all attendees!
Other Bristol Refugee Festival events
We also attended 2 other events held by other organisations for Bristol Refugee Festival.
Creative Youth Network's Eid Feast was held on the 20th June at the Station. Julia from our careers team had a stall at their event to advertise our free courses and free careers advice. It was a great turnout and some delicious food was shared amongst local refugees, businesses and members of the community.
Another event which we never miss is Bristol Refugee Festival’s very own event – Celebrating Sanctuary. This is the flagship event for the festival and this year it was held on 24th June at Queen Square, Bristol. We had a stall at the event to give people information about the variety of services we offer at ACH. Also, some of our learners on the UK Youth and Starbucks Youth Action course gained experience of working on a catering stall for part of the day with Moveable Feast – they did brilliantly!
The day was beautiful, with the amazing weather topping it all off. As always, the performers were incredible, and the atmosphere was one full of hope and openness. Thank you to Bristol Refugee Festival for organising the whole day! It was great to meet new and old faces and to hear the positive thoughts everyone had about refugees in Bristol.
