Introduction

By 2001, policies regarding refugee people seeking asylum were changing at great speed, with ‘forced dispersal’ being one such policy, introduced in 1999. Without the introduction of this policy, it is highly probable that most of the residents of the city where the project discussed in this chapter happened would rarely, if ever, have met a single refugee person seeking asylum. In response to the impact of that policy, in September 2002, the Salford RAPAR (Refugee and Asylum Seeker Participatory Action Research) project began. It offered an innovative research approach to tackling issues that were, themselves, new to the agencies and the communities in the city.

This research project was designed to involve and empower refugee people seeking asylum, the local community and local service deliverers, being most fundamentally distinguishable from casework by the fact that the process consciously sought to understand the nature of the presenting problems, and reactions to them in relation to the wider social context and surrounding networks (Wright Mills, 1963, p 440). It considered the processes at work at the level of society, rather than confining the approach to a consideration of the problems at the level of the individual. I understand the method used in the context of the work discussed in this chapter to be a participatory action research approach (Wadsworth, 1998) that has been conducted inside an action learning framework (Revans, 1982). The reasons for my decision to identify the methods in this way are rooted in the direct involvement of people who presented to our project in an evidence-base development process that included sharing information with service providers about such evidence as it was emerging: it is the actions that we took during this process that created opportunities for people to engage in a continuous learning process for effecting constructive change.

Further, the giving and receiving of support was not excluded from the project, as might be expected with casework. Rather, offering support was an integral part of the activities that combined to effectively engage with presenting issues, complementing the whole process by enabling trust and confidence to grow within and between the refugee people seeking asylum and the wider community.