What we do

Regular club sessions

We hold sessions at our partner organisations: The Holbeck club and Mill Hill Chapel.

We offer a warm welcome to everyone, especially our asylum-seeker and refugee guests, providing a friendly and inclusive space where they can meet people and make friends.

One of our main aims is to help guests to improve their English through conversation. We have a team of native or fluent English-speaker volunteers who simply chat with guests and encourage them to speak English as much as possible. This is an important part of their language-learning, to help them to use the grammar and vocabulary learned in classes, in a real-life situation.

Another aspect of our work is to signpost guests to other professional organisations for support with the many difficulties they face. We are a group of volunteers, and very aware that our guests often need help from professionals that we are not able to give.

We hope that guests, volunteers and visitors coming to Conversation Club will always feel a little happier for being there.

Planned:

• Talks by outside speakers. Previously we have had talks from the Woodhouse Moor allotment, Cleveland Bertram from PATH language project, Nicky Bray (with songs), Richard Solomons from Fell Edge Farm, Addingham. Also, Jack Moore came and talked to us about NCS the Challenge (National Citizen Service). He came back with some young people who volunteered and fundraised for us and provided hampers for all the guests at the Christmas party.
• We hope to hold a Christmas party again in 2022. We had parties 3 years running at Mill Hill Chapel, and they were great fun! We even had visits from Santa Claus.

Discontinued:

• Provision of clothes, sanitary goods, children’s items. Unfortunately, we don’t have the capacity to provide these services, due to lack of storage space.

Visits and outings

We organise regular outings to locations in the Leeds and the surrounding countryside. Here are our most recent:

• Leeds Light Night
  Leeds Light Night is ‘an annual free multi-arts and light festival that takes over Leeds ...
• Beeston Festival
  A group of us spent the afternoon at Beeston Festival, with a picnic and games, ...
• Glorious Wharfedale!
  On 16th August 2021, several volunteers took a small group of guests, including some from ...
• Outing to Fell Edge
  Fell Edge Barn is a large bright and beautiful space near Ilkley Moor for community ...
• Visit to Leeds City Museum
  A small group of us visited a special exhibition about migration at the Leeds City ...
• Outing to Malham
  We had a lovely outing up to Malham with the help of People and the ...
• Walk around Leeds City Centre
  Tales of a City Tours is a social enterprise in which people with a refugee ...

More activities

We organise regular cultural and recreational activities. Here are some recent examples:

• ‘Lighting Up Lockdown’ – a project to offer a lockdown activity within reach of all guests, we developed a partnership with several other refugee / asylum seeker organisations, gathering pictures taken by volunteers, asylum seekers and refugees, and published them online as photo-galleries. Some truly beautiful contributions! Read more…
• ‘Musicultural Conversations’ sessions on Tuesday evenings at The Holbeck, organised by Liz & Nicky Bray. Guests from CCL could join in group singing and enjoy a hot meal, meeting with people from other organisations.
• Indian cookery demonstration held at Open Source Arts on Kirkstall Rd. Chef extraordinaire: Anne Collins (guest).
• Free tickets to shows at our partner organisations Opera North & Leeds Playhouse
• Opera North ‘Lullaby Project’ that we were involved in. The ON team recorded lullabies from their own countries, sung by guests. The recordings may have been put online.
• The West Yorkshire Playhouse’s final production before its major renovation and transformation into Leeds Playhouse, was a show called ‘Searching for the Heart of Leeds’, in which Conversation Club (and in particular Helen Parkin RIP) featured in a small way, although the names were changed.
• Recreational activities: including signposting to other groups, eg Harmony choir, Asmarina Voices, Holbeck football club, Woodhouse Moor allotment, ESOL classes, etc.