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Many thanks to those who were able to attend the first meeting of our Immigration Advice Funding Strategy development workshops.
Rupinder Parhar from the GLA and Jonathan Price from Paul Hamlyn Foundation set the context for us on the rising need for good quality immigration advice in London (high demand and low capacity already as a result of Legal Aid reforms, and rising up the agenda of non-specialist organisations as a result of covid) and also about work already underway. Useful links to previous research include:
- GLA commissioned mapping of social welfare advice in London https://asauk.org.uk/projects/
- Paul Hamlyn Foundation commissioned research https://www.phf.org.uk/publications/methods-of-increasing-the-capacity-of-immigration-advice-provision-executive-summary/
- London Funders' previous research on how funders can support the resilience of people in funded organisations (recruitment and retention are big issues for the immigration advice sector) https://londonfunders.org.uk/resources-funders/london-funders-publications/resilience-people-community-facing-organisations-what
We also heard from Tania Cohen at 360Giving on a data dive into who currently funds immigration advice and who is active in adjacent sectors that will be impacted by poor access to good advice.
Our discussion focused on how we make the case for investing in high quality, sustainable immigration advice, and how we might frame the case for funders who are new to this field or funders looking to increase the impact of their funding. We will be picking these discussions up at two further meetings in this series and hope you will join us for these.