Cumbria Community Foundation - Furness: Opportunities and Challenges 2021

F U R N E S S – O P P O R T U N I T I E S & C H A L L E N G E S 25 Furness Voices Multicultural Communities “We provide support for people with a myriad of issues around immigration and the right to settle in Furness, welfare benefits, employment, and education.” Janine Adams There is a varied ethnic community in Furness, even if it only represents a small percentage of the population. People from Asian countries like India, Pakistan, the Philippines, China, and Thailand, European nations including Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Kosovo, Albania, Greece and from African countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, and Algeria and from the US, have all made the area their home. Furness Multicultural Community Forum (FMCF) provides services which are tailored to the needs of individuals and groups from different backgrounds, to give them a voice and to help with integration and finding and creating activities that are meaningful to people from diverse backgrounds. It also plays a vital role in providing information, advice, advocacy, and signposting for a range of issues faced by the multicultural community in the Furness area. A grassroots community organisation, the FMCF has been in operation since the late 1990s and became a constituted charity in early 2003, working in partnership with other organisations and making sure all the local ethnic groups are being helped and supported, and making local people aware of different cultures. It provides activities for young people and women in terms of skills-based projects, as well as holding a long-established youth group. Janine Adams, lead community and youth worker, said: “We support victims of hate crimes and work closely with the local police to ensure these incidents are managed correctly, that victims feel heard and that they understand the process.” The challenges that people from other cultures face include hate crime, barriers to integration such as learning English, employment, housing, grief (due to loss of home and identity), loneliness, isolation, feeling overwhelmed, asking for/seeking mental healthcare, dealing with the police and immigration paperwork. It is important to note that in many cases there are challenges across more than one area. Janine continues: “Other challenges are that local people are not showing any interest to learn from the other cultures, but they follow any social media post with myths which have no truth and they try to bully people from other cultures as being here to steal their jobs and claim public funds. “There is also hatred and racism for the people of other cultures for being successful or for trying to settle in the county.”