2025 is a very special year for Haringey Welcome because we are 10 years old! To celebrate our 10th anniversary, we had a party hosted by Karamel in Wood Green. We have held several events at Karamel over the years – we love them and we love their food. Guests had to make the difficult choice of an Indian Thali or an African Thali. Gorgeous and delicious mixes of different dishes arranged beautifully and generously. Thank you Karamel!
After the lovely food everyone decanted into McQueen’s Theatre. It was wonderful to see so many friends, colleagues, partners, collaborators and all the many others who have been involved with the work and the life of HW over the last 10 years. All gathered here to celebrate ten years of HW and our amazing community’s resistance to hostile immigration policies and commitment to being a welcoming borough.
Proud Haringey resident, HW volunteer and Producer of our podcast, Tanya Harmer was our brilliant MC for the evening. She kicked things off with a short recap about HW and its work, and went on to outline how this 10-year anniversary coincides with HW registering as a non-profit company, which means we’ll now have the capacity to raise funds, do more community engagement and outreach, and have more visibility for our campaign work.
Tanya then introduced this wonderful film produced especially for the event by Tom Newman, director of Fable productions. The film features people past and present, with HW founders Lucy and Ruth talking about how Haringey Welcome started, and some of its standout projects to date.
After the film, our friend and word weaver, Champagne, delivered a powerful performance of one of her poems called Two Sides of the Coin that reflected on differing experiences of migrant reception, from hostile to welcoming. We got a lovely surprise when her son Mali stood up with a brilliant rendition of a poem he wrote recently as part of his school’s celebration of Black History Month.
The next part of the evening was a conversation with the leader of Haringey Council, Cllr Peray Ahmet, who had agreed not only to participate in our birthday party, but to subject herself to a grilling by Zrinka Bralo, CEO of Migrants Organise and long-term HW partner. We have been working with Haringey Council for a long time and helped them to develop a Welcome Strategy for the borough.
We wanted to talk to Peray about this relationship and the renewal of Haringey Council’s commitment to consolidating and developing Haringey as a welcoming borough. It was an interesting exchange in which the importance of cooperation between Haringey Welcome and the council was highlighted. Peray confirmed that the council is still very engaged with this work alongside community partners, and that a relaunch of the Welcome Advisory Board will take place on 18 November, with a remit to focus on development and roll-out of an updated Welcome Strategy after next year’s local election.
After a short break, we were back and Tanya introduced a video featuring Lara Parmiani, Creative Director of Legal Aliens Theatre. Lara is a co-founder of HW but sadly couldn’t be with us because she is on tour with her new play, the Flowers of Srebrenica. She made a short video for us where she talked about Haringey Welcome and the long-time partnership and friendship with Legal Aliens. She then introduced the next part of the programme which was an excerpt from a new play, called Snakes and Ladders written by and starring London based Iranian, Hamed Vojudsadhe. This new play which is not yet completed is based on Hamed’s experience of getting out of Iran and eventually making it to the UK. The excerpt we were privileged to see was a stark illustration of the gap between the personal reality of forced migration, and the complete absence of understanding of this reality when it is up against bureaucracy and processing.
Alongside Hamed, was Venezuelan actress Cristina Martínez. Since 2023, Cristina & Hamed have been training as professional actors with Legal Aliens Theatre, and they collaborate with Lara as facilitators to make theatre experience accessible to migrants, refugees and asylum seekers at regular drama workshops in Tottenham. They were also joined by Chris Walter, theatre director of Snakes and Ladders.
Our next and final performer was Aksa Cannoli, a student and spoken word artist, singer and performer with band The Unknowns. Aksa is a trustee and collaborator with Hear Me Out, an organisation that helps people inside immigration detention centres to express their humanity through music.
She performed W.H. Auden’s poem, Refugee Blues. Written in 1939 the poem encapsulates much of the trauma, uncertainty and loss of being a refugee. It is a timeless and compassionate piece of writing that is as relevant today as when Auden wrote it. Aksa’s choice of this work and her riveting performance of it was another very powerful moment of the evening. She recently performed this poem with The Unknowns at the Union Chapel and you can see a video of that performance here. Aksa then treated us to an a cappella version of the Michael Jackson song You are not Alone. Her beautiful voice left us all enthralled and brought an end to the generous contributions from our creative friends and colleagues.
That just left Tanya to introduce the final star of the evening, Chair of HW Lucy Nabijou, who really does need no introduction. She encouraged the audience to join the HW mailing list and look out for forthcoming announcements regarding fundraising and volunteering opportunities, and other news. She highlighted the success of HW’s community fund to prevent refugee homelessness which to date has supported 23 people into housing who would otherwise have been facing street homelessness. The fund is almost empty and Lucy called for anyone able to donate to do so, so that we can keep the support going as winter approaches. Without Lucy HW would not exist and it was lovely to be able to celebrate not only how far HW has come but to look forward to a new chapter in which we can grow and contribute more to making migrants and refugees welcome in Haringey.
For the last part of the evening we were back at the bar in Karamel where DJ Tsvetan played us all out.
Thank you for 10 years of love and support. We are looking forward to the future!
For anyone who was at the event we would really appreciate if you could give us your feedback by taking this short survey. It should only take a couple of minutes and would really help us. https://forms.gle/4F8JR8xZf5HMe6ag8
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