Welcome walks: walking for wellbeing
In November 2021 we decided that it would be great if we could set up some Wellbeing walks for for our Asylum Seeker, Refugees and Migrants, we aimed to offer a range of walks for all abilities and got started by attending walk leader training, we attended with one of our Welcome Mentor Volunteers Meg, who was keen to take the lead on these walks, the training gave us all the understanding ,skills and confidence needed to lead a walk.
In December we launched our first walk, we promoted it with partners and on Social Media and were joined by 9 participants who took part in a 2-hour History walk to and around Greenhead Park, one of the participants was a new arrival from China, she is single and said that this was the first time that she had been out and met people since she arrived – we took the opportunity to tell her about a wellbeing day that we were doing the following week at Growing works, we were delighted when she came along to that too.
The walks are every 2 weeks and Meg has taken them to Marsden, Beaumont Park and also did a “ getting to know your new area” walk around Huddersfield for the new arrivals.
Meg has really gone above and beyond in her walk leader role, she noticed that some of the participants would benefit from some more suitable clothing for walking and so she met with them and took them to the Sanctuary Clothing Project where they were kitted out for free with plenty of things to keep them toasty on the colder walks.
We have been tweeting about the walks to reach more people and one of tweets was seen by Hive Café in Huddersfield, they very kindly offered us and our walkers the opportunity to visit the café after our walk in January for a free cuppa, we visited and received such a lovely warm welcome, it is such a great opportunity for our new arrivals to experience that great Yorkshire hospitality and it is all so crucial in making them feel safe and welcomed – Hive café do a monthly social which they have all been invited to, our aim with any activities like this is always to support further integration in the community by giving them the opportunity to link up with other people and places of welcome and this is such a great example of that.
We are so grateful to Meg and to our partners for their support in getting this off the ground, to be able to offer these walks to our participants is really special, we think that they are unique and already making such a big difference to people in our community.