Becoming 20

Although it sometimes seems hard to believe, Multi-Cultural Family Base will be 20 years old on 1^st March.  We started out in a small damp Leith basement room in Smith’s Place (off Leith Walk) with a borrowed computer, a volunteer manager and £5k to our name.  The ethos of MCFB was the same then as it is today: a real determination to improve children’s lives, make a contribution to better race relations and to contribute meaningfully to social work student education, particularly around anti-racist and cross-cultural practice.  Having said that, much has changed in the demographics of our work.  Back then most of our work was with the more settled Scottish Sikh and Pakistani communities whereas now our work is predominantly with new arrivals whether they are new migrants, refugees or asylum seekers. 

We have been thinking hard about how we celebrate our achievements over 20 years, as well as looking forward to our work in the years ahead.   We want our events to be led by our service users, both past and present, with some family celebrations as well as a more formal event.  We have been talking to a film maker about making a small film highlighting the work of the agency over the years.  We will keep you posted as these events shape up and we would, of course, welcome any ideas about how you think we can best celebrate our anniversary. 

Networking and partnerships

MCFB is very well connected with a whole plethora of different organisations:  other voluntary agencies, schools, social work, health and creative and sports organisations.  In the last year we have established a new partnership with Big Hearts, the charitable wing of Hearts FC, which has led to the TEAM Project (Together Equality Achieves More), a weekly group which brings together children from a diverse range of communities who live in the Tynecastle cluster. 

Our children and young people have been actively involved in joint groups with Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Stills Gallery, Bridge 8Hub, Spartans FC and Play2 Learn.  We are exploring how we can continue and develop these links in the coming year.  It’s also great to be re-developing  a partnership this year with Tinderbox Orchestra who will be providing the music for our three community ceilidhs. 

A lot of different agencies are providing services to the newly arrived Syrian community.  We were pleased recently to become part of the New Scots Edinburgh Steering group which brings together different agencies working with the refugee communities and we are delighted to contribute to a Burns Night ceilidh/ celebration on Thursday 25^th January together with Re-Act, The Welcoming and Edinburgh Churches for Sanctuary.  All of this joint work fits in with the Scottish Government’s recently announced New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy.

We will continue to look at ways of raising our profile through taking part in community events and through newspaper articles, Facebook and Twitter.  So watch this space!    

Steve Gowenlock, 11th January 2018.