CLEAR stands for “City Life Education and Action for Refugees” and has been a project of City Life Church since 2001 when Southampton became a dispersal city for people seeking asylum and refugees. For more than 20 years, CLEAR has supported people through the process and helped them rebuild their lives in the UK.

Our Team

We have a small team of 12 part-time staff, supported by an amazing team of volunteers and qualified freelance tutors, who are passionate about providing free, independent professional advice, practical support and English language courses to people seeking asylum and refugees in Southampton.

EU Welcome

EU Welcome began in 2004 as a joint initiative between Southampton City Council’s New Communities Team and the City Centre Catholic Parish of Southampton. The aim was to give support to migrant workers from the new countries of the European Union, to aid integration and to provide good quality information to ensure that all clients understood their rights in the UK, and could play their part to make Southampton an even better place in which to live and work. In January 2018, EU Welcome became part of the CLEAR Project – a brief history can be found on the EU Welcome page.

Our Values

Compassionate Community

We embrace diversity, welcoming both friends and strangers, and seek to offer a place of belonging to all.

Pioneering

We are responsive to the needs of those within our community and in the communities, we serve, finding creative solutions, breaking new ground, and courageously embracing the challenges that come with change!

Empowering

We seek to give people the tools to enable them to live well and thrive. We are committed to justice for all, respecting each person’s beliefs and choices.

Creativity

We value the courage to reflect, learn and express ourselves creatively. We celebrate creativity in every action, expression, response, and collaboration.

How We Work

Our delivery model, based upon Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, may be expressed as advocate, educate and empower. We begin by offering advocacy, advice and practical help to new arrivals to help them to navigate the asylum system and to ensure their access to Home Office shelter and subsistence. We provide access to ESOL learning, appropriate to their educational level, and we use this as a bridge across which to convey messages around identity, belonging, agency, self-worth, health and culture to aid integration.

We aim to be a friendly and welcoming community and we know that many clients really appreciate the way in which we assist them. By offering English courses and other adult learning, employment advice and volunteer opportunities we are able to provide joined up services which both deal with the immediate issues that people face and help them to progress.

We enjoy a well-deserved reputation for the quality, impact and holistic nature of our advice and educational provision. Clients often come back again and again over the process of integration into society, which can take many years. We help them at key stages; assisting on arrival in the UK, during the process of claiming asylum, through getting immigration status and applying for settlement, to citizenship and finally applying for a British passport.

Our Vision

Over the past 20 years, CLEAR have become woven into the fabric of the city’s support network for people seeking asylum and refugees, and we continue to work in collaboration with other organisations to constantly improve advocacy, education and empowerment for the people we support.