At Rainbow Haven we provide a range of services to asylum seekers, refugees and migrant workers new to Manchester and Salford. In terms of advice work, we mainly deal with housing and benefits issues, but people also need help with navigating the complexities of our UK systems. We employ three advice workers, who tend to carry out the most complex cases, supported by a team of eight advice volunteers currently. In the past year, we have seen 1576 people for advice, ranging from signposting to complex cases (not including all of our telephone or online advice).
We have sent some of our existing volunteers to the MVAP training who then do advice work here. We’ve also sent some excellent people that we couldn’t provide a placement to as we didn’t have capacity, which means they had the chance to be placed elsewhere. The training seems quite comprehensive and open to people from different backgrounds. It enables them come out with a similar level of knowledge to get started on volunteering effectively. The MVAP team has quite a lot of understanding about people’s needs and are pretty flexible. It’s a good trusted training programme we can offer to volunteers.
For the last two rounds of the MVAP training programme, we have also been a placement agency for the programme. This has led to us having two volunteers placed with us who are already trained, which means they can soon get started and it saves us a lot of time. You can’t get fully trained outside of Rainbow Haven for our work, but it’s a good grounding and level of confidence for them to then shadow an advice worker and grasp it quite quickly. Without MVAP, one of the advice workers would deliver training – just a half day session as they don’t have time to do more. People then have to learn on the job. So it takes a long time for them to get the skills and knowledge and for the advice team to trust people to take things on independently.
We have five advice volunteers who’ve been through the MVAP programme. They tend to be doing the more straightforward stuff, like Manchester Move (housing), writing MP letters, calling GPs. Really good advice volunteers are hard to find, so having five is really valuable. The numbers may not sound very big but in terms of the quality and volume of people we can support it’s pretty impactful.
Rainbow Haven
Activities and Volunteer Coordinator
