The Pickwell Partners
The Pickwell Partners are community groups, businesses, organisations that have made a substantive contribution to supporting displaced people. Those with the Pickwell Partners symbol will have given time, resource, skill and commitment to ensure the welcome of displaced individuals, to facilitate activities promoting their wellbeing and to create safe, appropriate contexts for them to share their identities and stories.
In November 2022 a hotel in Ilfracombe was commissioned by the Home Office as an Initial Accommodation Hotel for individuals seeking asylum in the hotel. Around 140 people were bussed into the town and left in the hotel with merely a helpline number to call and a small staff team.
Almost immediately groups within the community gathered to ask a couple of simple questions: What is at our disposal to support these people? What can we offer to help?
As this response formalised and The Pickwell Foundation were engaged to coordinate work around the hotel those that had come forward in generosity and kindness partnered with Pickwell putting their resources, skills, energies and facilities at the disposal of the guests in the hotel.
There have been beautiful outcomes from these partnerships ranging from en masse haircuts at training salons to cricket matches, from collaborative art spaces to recipe swapping supper clubs. What has been revealed through it all, is the importance of human connection and the capacity of community to restore dignity and hope to those who have had it stripped from them.
Pickwell Partners have been awarded this acknowledgement as a means of expressing The Pickwell Foundation’s gratitude for the support, generosity and solidarity that has been shown. This small act of acknowledgement, amongst complexities of the situation, is intended to communicate each organisation, business or group’s involvement and contribution.
This legacy extends beyond those who supported the asylum hotel, its friends and partners supporting our community sponsorship groups, our Homes for Ukraine team and the Afghan resettlement scheme.
Full list of Partners here;
Ilfracombe Infant and Nursery School
Community Environmental Educational Therapy CIC
