Because of your ongoing encouragement and generosity, this year we have deepened and expanded our arts-based mental health and wellbeing support for people who have been displaced and those seeking sanctuary.
We are proud to be a mobile charity whose artists and art therapists travel to where we are needed most to provide vital arts-based mental health and wellbeing support, alongside our partners. Through our open access workshops using The Community Table model, we have reached several thousand adults, children and unaccompanied young people over the last 12 months on either side of the English Channel as well as in Paris, London and Bristol. We also began a year long desperately needed project supporting people (mostly young people aged 18-25) housed in Wethersfield Asylum Centre, a former RAF base in rural Essex. In 2024, our training and skills-sharing work was rich and far-reaching, involving training for hundreds of frontline workers in the UK and internationally.
Across our work, we have actively started to build positive connections between people seeking asylum and people in local communities, finding creative ways to come together. We have increased our pool of artists who have personal experiences of displacement to support this collective work which aims to make space for mutual learning and respect, and increased hope.
With no physical charity base, we keep overheads to an absolute minimum, with the vast majority of our income spent on direct delivery costs. We make great efforts to use our resources with care, reusing materials as a core principle of our practice.
While we strive to secure funding from a wide range of sources, we depend on your vital donations. To set up a monthly payment, or a make a one-off donation please go to: www.artrefuge.org.uk/donate or visit our new Fundraising page on our website for fundraising ideas.
Please continue to follow Art Refuge, share our posts, discuss the issues, build bridges of all sizes, and join us, alongside hundreds of other organisations, as we collectively work towards a fairer, kinder, more open and peaceful world in 2025.
With our sincere thanks from all at Art Refuge
