Bahar AFG Women’s AssociationEvaluation Report 2018

Henriette MahamaneProject Support OfficerLeeds City CouncilFebruary 2018

Aim of this report: This report provides an insight into the support provided by ‘Bahar AFG Women’s

Association’ to meet local community need and aims to give an awareness the contribution

this makes towards citywide priorities and ambitions.

Background: Bahar, the woman behind the association: The organisation began with its founder and chair Bahar Kheshrawi who left Afghanistan

when she was 13 years old after witnessing the death of several members of her family,

including her mother. Exile was her only hope for a better life. During her long journey,

walking for many miles sometimes on train tracks, sometimes hiding in lorries, Bahar

married as a form of protection. After 4 years Bahar and her husband finally arrived in the

UK.

Bahar, was 9 months pregnant when she arrived and couldn’t speak a word of English. She

felt isolated and had not had the opportunity to grieve for her losses or share her pain. She

wanted to share her story and let people know what had happened to her, but had no one to

talk to. She reached a point where she took a chance and joined group supporting refugees

and people seeking asylum. Gradually, Bahar learnt English, interacted with people and her

confidence grew. She decided that wanted to help others achieve this too. “Many Afghan

women suffered during the war, they often have family problems, are victims of domestic

violence and forced marriage at a young age. I always wanted to help them, but I didn’t

know how.” Bahar was determined to make a difference in other women’s lives and in 2011

Bahar started to organise informal activities with some women from the Afghan community.

In 2013, Bahar AFG Women’s Association was officially born. Bahar’s first project was called

‘Love and Communication’ which aimed to help Afghan mothers and their children acquire

both English and Afghan language skills for them to enable improved communication with

one another. Bahar had identified the breakdown in communication between parent and

child as they were losing a mutual language. Bahar recognised helping Afghan mothers to

speak English is essential, to communicate with schools, the NHS and council’s services,

emergency services and to feel part of their new community.

Leeds City Council: Migrant Access Project

Bahar attended the Migrant Access Project training programme becoming a Migrant

Community Networker (MCN) in 2014. The project aims to alleviate pressures on services by

increasing new arrivals awareness and appropriate access to services; ensure services join up

to work with migrant communities as part of their mainstream business; and strengthen

Organisation Structure:Bahar AFG Women’s Association is a grassroots registered voluntary organisation with

future aspirations of registering as a charity in the future. The management committee is

made up of nine women representative of the community it serves, and includes White

British. The management committee is led by committed women, many of which volunteered

for the organisation first, and progressed to the Management Committee. For many it is their

first time experience of leading an organisation and value this progression route to share

their experiences and shape the organisation decisions making. It is felt this experience is

valuable contributor in helping them to access employment. The management committee

and volunteers meet monthly meetings to discuss operational and strategic matters.

Chair

Secretary

Tresurer

First Aider

Committee Member

Committee Member

Leeds City Council: Migrant Access Project

Bahar attended the Migrant Access Project training programme becoming a Migrant

Community Networker (MCN) in 2014. The project aims to alleviate pressures on services by

increasing new arrivals awareness and appropriate access to services; ensure services join up

to work with migrant communities as part of their mainstream business; and strengthen

Vision:To grow and open new places in others cities in the UK and why not, in other

countries!

Ambition: To be able to own our premises where customers will be able to access our services.

Being able to help volunteers involved in our organisation to make a living out of their work.

Services and Activities: Bahar AFG Women’s Association, operating from Little London Community Centre, provides

a range of activities to meet need. These include ESOL classes, developing skills for

employment, IT classes, parenting classes befriending. A key element of the service is

increasing awareness and understanding of services and signposting and referring to

appropriately. The organisation has grown as demand has increased.

Weekly activities:

Monday ESOL CLASS: in partnership with Leeds City College 2.5

DROP-IN and BEFRIENDING SESSION: different weekly focus topics

Wednesday Mixed English reading and writing class

Thursday English Conversation and Safeguarding Class: conversation classes

and awareness raising and key safety topics including FGM,

grooming, hate crime, fire safety and domestic violence.

In addition to Bahar AFG Women’s Association have delivered:

health, healthy eating and exercise classes

one off accredited training on a range of topics e.g. children and safeguarding

surgeries with local Councillors

advice sessions on housing and legal advice session delivered in partnership with by

qualified providers immigration solicitors (Haider Solicitors) and family lawyers, these

are open to service users and wider public.

housing advice sessions.

preparation support for the Life in the UK test.

Where appropriate session are open up to the public e.g. legal advice.

Commitment to support volunteers:The organisation has successfully recruited a number of the volunteers who contribute

hugely to activities, sessions and meetings. There are currently 12 active volunteers who

support the running of weekly activities. These are made up of previous service users and

one of them was successful in paid employment as an ESOL teacher position at Leeds City

College. In addition the organisation regularly hosts university and college with student work

placements. By doing so, we actively support both new and settled communities to access

employment by providing practical experience. One volunteer feedback:

“It helps me to get more experience, confidence, improve my English, find more

friends, and receive more information about the other cultures while having fun. I

found that I believe more in myself and other women because many of them are

successful ladies who visit, talk and teach us. PC Geeta from West Yorkshire Police

visited us regularly and then delivered sessions that I know everybody benefited.

They learned about the police and their own rights in this country.”

Crèche Facilities: Bahar has worked hard to develop a crèche facility so women are able to access session

effectively and crèche volunteers gain training and experience contributing to improved

employment opportunities. This opportunity in the heart of the community has proven

beneficial because of the trust with Bahar and women being more confident to access

services and learn. All the volunteers are DBS checked and have previous experience with

children and the volunteers are supervised by a Professional Teaching Assistant. The

volunteers are trained including Child Protection and safeguarding organised by Voluntary

Action Leeds. In addition, the volunteers received up to date first aid training. For safety

purposes, food and drinks are not provided other than water and the crèche is covered by

the building’s liability insurance.

Engaging the Community:When Bahar first started to deliver activities to the community she struggled to engage

Afghan women, the very women she wanted to support to address issues they face. She

was determined to bring them out of the house and isolation. She, very bravely, visited

Afghan families the men about the benefits of their wives/partners learning to speak English,

this would reduce pressures in the men as they are always having to deal with all matters.

Bahar got the buy in from many Afghan men and this has proved extremely beneficial.

Currently, the team speak 9 community languages (Dari, Farsi, Urdu, Indi, Punjabi, Pashtu,

Arabic, Kurdish, and Russian) instrumental in helping to make the organisation and its

activities more accessible to diverse communities and instrumental in building strong

relationships. The services, activities and training sessions delivered by the organisation are

well attended across a wide range of ethnic backgrounds highlighting the relevance and the

accessibility of the activities.

Increasing demand:The main focus of the organisation has been to offer support women, however, more

recently increasing requests from female service users expressed the need to involve their

husbands in the organisation’s activities so they could learn about life in Leeds. In 2017

Bahar AFG opened activities to men including sessions on the Policing, safeguarding, first

aid, food and hygiene training and a new mixed gender English session that takes place

every Wednesday. Within the space of six days, ten men joined the group mostly from Iraq,

Kurdistan and Afghanistan. This underlines Bahar AFG Women’s Association establishment

in the Little London area and its strong reach capacity.

In recent few months, there has been an increase contact from European nationals seeking

to make appointments to seek legal advice within solicitors drop in session.

Sustainability:The Migrant Access Project has supported the organisation with refreshments, cleaning

products and volunteer expenses. Since the introduction of community centre charging

policy, the Migrant Access Project has been able to provide interim support for the

organisation’s resources such as cleaning products, refreshments and volunteer expenses.

She has other funding that covers venue costs until January 2018. Venue costs were

secured with a successful application to the Leeds City Council’s Housing Advisory Panel for

January 2018 until January 2019. The organisation continue to grow and explore longer term

sustainable funding.

In relation to activities the organisation was successful in a funding bid to the Police and

Crime Commissioner. This allowed a ten week funded project that covers different

safeguarding related conversation classes. The funding also allowed the organisation to

purchase equipment to help run activities.

Services and partnerships:The organisation has built strong partnerships over the years with statutory and voluntary

organisations, as a result has a growing network of partners who support the organisation’s

activities and development. Bahar’s AFG also provide support, voice and influence to

partnerships across all sectors to share good practice towards achieving citywide ambitions.

Voluntary Action Leeds: have supported Bahar AFG with training, governance, policies

and procedures to ensure the organisation works effectively.

Leeds City College: support the organisation by providing accredited ESOL classes

whereby the college finance ESOL teachers and exams fees.

Hamara Healthy Living Centre: worked in partnership with Bahar AFG to address a gap in

the availability of health related activities. This lead to Hamara delivering a number of weekly

exercises and healthy eating awareness sessions at Little London community centre.

Physical activities included Zumba and Bollywood dancing which promoted healthy lifestyles,

improved mental wellbeing and reduced social isolation.

Life Long Learning at the University of Leeds: supporting women into further education,

what is available and the process in registering and accessing courses. Further referrals are

made as appropriate such as to an education adviser.

LASSN (Leeds Asylum Support Seekers Network): refer service users for English classes

and work in partnership to support interpreting and English at home.

Housing: partnership where Housing Leeds provide a drop-in session to support individuals

including advice, application forms etc.

Neighbourhood Policing: partnership working to raise awareness and building relationship

with communities.

Women’s Health Matters: supporting activities such as free training and raising awareness,

access to services.

Law firms: Ison Harrison and Haidar Solicitors provide free legal advice sessions.

NCS: supporting with fundraising and activities

Opera North: raising awareness of theatre and providing opportunities to see plays by

providing free tickets.

Schools: local schools to help including visit to the organisation. The aim was to raise

awareness to the school and where they referred parents to Bahar’s organisation for

support.

There are many more that Bahar continues to work in partnership with. Discussions are

taking place with Behind Closed Doors, Barca and many more.

Funding over the years has been received from Leeds City Council, Police and Crime

Commissioner, the Big Lottery, Community Foundation, Allen Lane

Responses to EvaluationService users:The organisation currently supports an average of 50-60 women a week. A short survey was

conducted to provide an overview of service users experiences completed by 14 number of

service users.

Postcode

LS6 LS7 LS8 LS9 LS11 LS13 LS17 BD3

The majority live around the Little London area however, many come from further afield as

shown below, and as far as Bradford.

Customers' nationalities

Afghan Chinese Bristish Pakistani British Kurdish Syrian Hungarian

The organisation is open to, and works to engage with, people from all communities.

Service user age range

20-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60+

The age profile of the group is diverse, there has been an increase of young mothers, as

organisation now meets the needs crèche facility needs.

Qualifications

No Higher Education Qualification Hold Higher Education Qualification No answer

All women who took part in the survey did not hold any higher education qualifications and

were not in employment. This highlights the vulnerability of the service users and the

relevance of the services provided by Bahar Women’s Association.

Do you feel more settled in Leeds

Yes No

As illustrated the majority of the women felt more settled in Leeds and confident about job prospects.

The feedback from the service users were extremely supportive of Bahar AFG Women’s

Association.

“This centre helped me to enhance my English language, and get me more confident

in my life.”

Feedback from partnersPositive feedback was received from partners with reference to capacity of Bahar AFG to

reach out to a large number of service users as a contributor to the enlargement of their

network. Comments includes:

“I admire Bahar, Mandy and the other volunteers’ generous spirit, amazing

energy and positive reception when you go along there. There is always a

very welcoming attitude and I’m so impressed with how many people they

manage to reach out to and help in invaluable ways.”

“AFG provides practical support, signposting and is a safe haven for one of

the most vulnerable and isolated sections of our citizens, migrant women

and families”

Development Opportunities:

There are opportunities to support the development and growth of the organisation by

exploring where there are effective opportunities to restructure and expand the management

committee. Carrying out a skills matrix can assist in identifying skill gaps and training and

recruitment can be driven accordingly. Consequently, the roles and responsibilities of the

board can be effectively assigned. Furthermore, as the organisation is expanding to support

mixed genders increasing male representation within the management board would be

beneficial.

Identifying opportunities to improve the level of transparency will build upon the positive

relationships Bahar AFG already have with service users and partners. This will in turn

complement the high level of enthusiasm and passion already present within the group.