What we do

Regular club sessions

We hold sessions at our partner organisations: the Catholic Cathedral and The Holbeck Club.

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.

Tuesdays, 1:30 to 3:30pm

The Holbeck
Jenkinson Lawn, Holbeck, Leeds LS11 9QX

Thursdays, 1:15 to 3:15pm

Wheeler Hall (Catholic Cathedral), St Anne’s St, Leeds LS2 8BE

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.

Conversation Club café
A Conversation Club session

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.
Contact us to find out more

Visits and outings

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

Contact us to find out more

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.
Contact us to find out more
Indian cookery demonstration
Indian cookery demonstration