By Millie Khisa, Oxford Hub.
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Following the closure of the Leys Community Centre, I have been asking community organisations and businesses that used the centre to share the challenges they have had to overcome in order to continue delivering their services. Here I speak to one of the volunteers of SYRCOX, an organisation which used the centre regularly.
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We started off back in 2015 with a purpose of bringing together members of the Syrian community and supporting each other in tackling various issues we faced as immigrants and SYRCOX (The Syrian Community Oxfordshire) was born. We started with 14 members and now we have grown to over 2,000 members!
My name is Hadi, one of three directors all working as volunteers for the organisation. We are currently registered as a limited company, but in the process of registering as a CIO (Charity Incorporated Organisation) which would put us in better standing in being funded as our programmes have become bigger and would like our impact to be more far reaching.
We have four main projects;
An emergency food parcel service every Thursday from the Oxford Hub site at Windale. We are grateful to Oxford Hub for providing a space where we can run this food service here in the Leys. We are partly funded by OCF and the OCC on this project.
We also work closely with Nigel from the food ladder, who has been generous and offered us space to share with them at the leisure centre to store our excess food. It helps, but the space is limited. We currently have a shortage of food donations from our suppliers and on many occasions have had to go and buy the food.
We hold prayers every Friday at the leisure centre, thanks to Richard the manager, who helped make this possible as we had nowhere to meet for prayers after the Community Centre closed.
We have a weekly men’s health programme where we have various sporting activities on Wednesdays at Brooks University Sports Centre.
Last but not least, we have a cultural club for young people at Cheney School open to all called The Sham Academy. “Sham” means a gathering of four countries; namely Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan. We teach the children about Eastern culture, mainly Arabic language and life skills born from our culture.
We have partnered with the Oxford University Museums to build knowledge through objects and other artefacts. We have 18 different nationalities that are represented in this club, as far away as Mauritius, the Middle East, Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa. There are a total of 80 children attending at 5 different levels. The Sham academy is funded mainly by the families that attend the academy through contributions to this programme.
We started by supporting mainly Syrians in Oxfordshire, but now have extended our services to the wider community. We have extended our vision to share our Syrian culture and goodness with the other communities. In this way we have cohesion and build friendships and a bridge between communities.
“We can stand and have our voices heard through our shared ideas as minority groups.”
The work in the community has increased so much as there is great need for our service. Our biggest problem is finding spaces to run our projects and to also have consistent funding from the OCC.
We also need help in changing from a limited company to a CIO. Some expert advice is needed but it costs a lot of money which we don’t have. It is a very technical and complicated registration process and if your organisation hasn’t got anyone qualified then you find you are stuck. I am sure we are not the only organisation in this situation and would ask the OCC to help in this matter too.
I enjoy the partnerships we have with OCC, Oxford Hub, leisure centre, the ladder and all the many community groups and people I came across that are dedicated to helping people of the community.
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If you think you can help support Hadi and SYRCOX in any way, then please get in touch with them directly here.
