Triangular began as a community support group and has since evolved into a registered charity that helps refugees and asylum seekers settle in the UK. One of the charity's founders, Dr Sirak Hagos, describes how Lloyds Bank Foundation’s support enabled the charity to evolve and extend its knowledge and expertise to a network across the north-east.
We provide a holistic approach to advice and guidance to asylum seekers, migrants, and refugees from all over the world, whether it's support with language, housing, volunteering, employability, or broader wellbeing. Providing the right information at the right time makes a crucial difference to individuals and the wider community.
Triangular has a regular drop-in sessions for refugees as well as provides support through projects including ones to tackle loneliness and social isolation by bringing together women of refugee and recent migrant backgrounds; delivering food to 35 households during the pandemic; training volunteers with lived experience to help others to find work, apply for benefits and build their confidence; and two support volunteers to befriend refugees from diverse backgrounds in Gateshead and Newcastle.
Person supported by Triangular, Gateshead
SV, a single mother from Zimbabwe, contacted Triangular last year after she was granted refugee status. She was facing complex housing issues, unemployment, and mental ill health. Our sessional workers and volunteers at the Gateshead Triangular Centre supported her in changing her situation by securing housing, helping with utilities, and applying for Universal Credit. We also helped her with her CV and finding work as an assistant teacher at a nearby school. Her outlook quickly brightened, and her mental health improved. SV remains an active member of our community, participating in sports and developing a strong interest in boxing. She is also interested in volunteering to give back and make new friends.
As well as providing frontline support to individuals, demand for our specialist knowledge and experience has seen our work naturally evolve. We now operate within a network of 20 small Refugee Community Organisations (RCOs), helping an estimated 10,000 people. Starting as a small refugee community group, we understand the challenges other small groups face when trying to formalise their community activities. RCOs are usually led by well-educated and well-meaning volunteers that don’t have the experience of running a charity in the UK, and many fold as a result. We support RCOs to be strong community groups, equipping them with tools to run their organisations effectively - to have good organisational standards and to put in place necessary policies and procedures.
Like Triangular, these RCOs are often the first point of contact, providing advice and reassurance to people who may have arrived in the UK under traumatic circumstances, with little understanding of the language and culture. They also act as a liaison between refugees and asylum seekers and local authorities and other service providers. RCOs do vital work that all too often go under the radar with little recognition and funding. They can engage and support their members in ways that other organisations and agencies would find difficult if not impossible. Language, and cultural affinity, the trust born of the shared experience of forced exile, enable them to operate holistically and intuitively.
We applied for a £30k grant from the Lloyds Bank Foundation's infrastructure programme in 2021. This grant enabled us to develop a capacity-building programme to assist RCOs with quality assurance of organisational standards and guidance with the implementation of policies and procedures. Three of these RCO's have now registered as Community Interest Companies with the assistance of Triangular. In addition, our community champions have formed close relationships with local Citizens Advice, enhancing refugees' access to advice and information.
Supporting and working with RCOs makes our own work easier. By working with RCOs we reach members of the community who have not been supported by other providers. Our projects are based on our day-to-day contact (embedded within the community) and the consultation we regularly carry out with these community groups making projects/activities relevant, useful and truly grassroots community based. We have access to a pool of volunteers and sometimes sessional workers – using resources that already exist within the community. Moreover, coming from diverse communities, the groups advise us on specific cultural and language consideration that make our activities easily accessible to many.
Even though we were well equipped to offer vital support and guidance to the refugees we support, we were not equipped to write good funding applications. Without the exceptional support the Foundation provides small charities such as ours, and its commitment to allocating 25% of its funding for charities led by and for people from Black, Asian, and minority ethnic communities, we would not have been successful with this grant.
- Dr Sirak Hagos
The Foundation has provided significant non-financial support too. We worked with a dedicated development partner to improve our data collection, which means we can now demonstrate the difference we make so we can secure future funding, and we have received guidance in developing a fundraising strategy, which resulted in securing another £50,000 grant from the Lloyds Bank Foundation. We are a small charity; our team consists of three founding trustees and three administrative staff. The grant has allowed us to hire a dedicated fundraising officer which has freed up some of our time, allowing us to focus on the governance and policies that come with being a registered charity. Neil Shashoua, our regional manager, has also been working with us to find new trustees, specifically someone with financial experience.
Through our work with the Foundation, we have also considered how we can ensure that we are a diverse, equitable and inclusive organisation. Those who are LGBTIQ+ may be forced to seek refugee status for fear of persecution because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and/or sex characteristics. We are working with RCO’s to improve education in the community about LGBT+ rights.
We have also been able to form a network with other small infrastructure organisations to learn from one another. I'll become a trustee for one of them, gaining knowledge and insight that will benefit Triangular as well.
Even though we were well equipped to offer vital support and guidance to the refugees we support, we were not equipped to write good funding applications. Without the exceptional support the Foundation provides small charities such as ours, and its commitment to allocating 25% of its funding for charities led by and for people from Black, Asian, and minority ethnic communities, we would not have been successful with this grant. The support is twofold: financial and organisational development. It works on trusting the charities it supports – the belief that the charities know what they need and are better positioned to spend the money on what they deem essential instead of dedicating how it should be spent. The organisation development support was as crucial as the financial support, and it helped us focus on strategy, governance and policies that have been evolutionary.
