KCRS is planning a fund-raising quiz night. Are you free on the evening of Monday 3/December?

Could you encourage some friends to come along too? It should be a light-hearted evening, not too expensive, and an opportunity to mix with people who share your belief in supporting refugee resettlement.

DATE & TIME: Monday 3/December, 7:00 for 7:30 pm

VENUE: The Willow; 16 The Triangle Kingston Upon Thames KT1 3RT; tel: 020 3034 2424; email: ped@blueskyconnexions.co.uk

GETTING THERE: by bus - 213 bus stops outside or by car – some local streets have unrestricted parking in the evening

ntry will be £5 (cash), collected on the night. We will have a professional quiz-master and there will be a raffle with some decent prizes. We hope to have 50 members and supporters attending and so raise around £500.

Tables will seat 4 – 6 people. Maybe you can organise a group of family / friends (max 6) to take up part or all of a table?

The venue is a bar/restaurant with an attached health centre. You can order food and drink from the bar during the quiz; if you might want to arrive early and eat there (10% off for quiz participants) their website has menu details (http://yourwillow.co.uk/ )

PLEASE CONTACT THE VENUE MANAGER, Ped Millichamp < email: ped@blueskyconnexions.co.uk > TO RESERVE SEATS FOR THE QUIZ OR FOR A MEAL BEFOREHAND

If you have any questions for KCRS then you can contact us at kingstoncrs@gmail.com

Hope to see you there.

Newsletter, September 2018

Things have moved on a bit since our June newsletter. On July 31^st we had a meeting of KCRS supporters in Kingston’s Guildhall to share ideas on how to find suitable accommodation for a refugee family. We have an initial draft of the written resettlement plan to be submitted for Home Office approval. We have developed a fund-raising strategy and taken aspects of this forward. We have also worked on some “back-room” projects, for example our data protection policy and practices and our ICT support more generally. More on some of this below, with a major focus on fund-raising.

On behalf of KCRS trustees, I hope that you have enjoyed the sunny summer and that you continue to see the ambition of KCRS to resettle vulnerable refugee families in our local area as a worthy aim.

Thank you for your support

Vince Daly

Chair, KCRS

Contact via KingstonCRS@gmail.com

KCRS fund-raising strategy

The Home Office requires that we have £9000 in the bank in order to receive permission to resettle a refugee family. KCRS trustees are treating this as a minimum requirement and have a fund-raising target of (at least) “a hundred £100s”, i.e. £10,000. At present, thanks mainly to some generous individual donations, we have raised just over £2,500 so we still have a way to go. Here’s our strategy for raising the rest of the money. It relies on support from our members so please take time to think how you might be able to help.

Small pledges

We are hoping that at least 50 people – members and supporters and their friends, families, co-workers, fellow congregants etc., will pledge to give £5 or £10 per month for a year. We have therefore registered KCRS with LocalGiving. LocalGiving raises funds from big donors and uses these funds to, at least partially, match money raised by their registered charities - such as KCRS. So if you, or someone you know, can afford £10 per month and LocalGiving can match it completely then that’s two of our “100 £100s” – even more than this with Gift Aid. Just £5 per month for a year would be one of our “100 £100s” with matched funding .

If you visit our website (Google: “Kingston KCRS”) and click on the “Support Us” tab, you’ll see that we now have a “Donation” page which explains everything in more detail. Please note especially that for KCRS to receive matched funding you should wait until we tell you that LocalGiving has started a matched funding campaign. This is usually in the Autumn; we’ll let you know when it happens.

If all of that sounds too complicated then we are happy to also receive straightforward donations. Our website tells how to do this at https://kcrs.org.uk/support-us/money-skills-and-time/  or you can go to the LocalGiving website (https://localgiving.org/ ) then go to their search page and search for us by name – “Kingston Community Refugee Sponsorship”.

Fund-raising teams

As part of our fund-raising strategy we are hoping to find five individuals or teams who are ready to organise fund-raising events, each team with a target of £500. Fund-raising activities might be anything from sponsored Abseiling to a Zumbathon. You can register as a KCRS fund-raiser at LocalGiving – they have plenty of fund-raising ideas. Also, they can collect the money you raise, as you raise it, and pass it on to us. Contact us at kingstoncrs@gmail.com or via our website: https://kcrs.org.uk/contact-us/ , if you are thinking about being a fund-raiser.

Fund-raising events

Currently, we have two events planned:

Fund-raising quiz night: On the evening of Monday 3/December there will be a quiz-night in aid of KCRS at The Willow bar/restaurant (16 The Triangle, KT1 3RT). Entrance will be £5 per head and a raffle at £5 per strip of tickets means that we will raise £500 if we can organise 10 tables of 5 people. Do you think you could promise to fill a table? If so, or if you just want to join one of the other tables, then let us know.

Fund-raising dinner: We want to run a Syrian-themed fund-raising dinner. We don’t have a date yet because we first need a volunteer event manager to help us plan and organise the dinner. Could this be you? Could you encourage someone else to volunteer?

Information and Communication

• As mentioned above, the KCRS website now has a donations page: https://kcrs.org.uk/support-us/money-skills-and-time/
• You might have noticed that the website also has a page (“About Community Sponsorship”) that summarises what we are about. We hope this will be useful if you are trying to encourage friends or family to support us.
• After taking expert advice, we have decided to move to Office365 for our email and IT support. This will allow additional security and flexibility. We will continue to use kingstoncrs@gmail.com for the time being and will keep you informed as the changes take place.
• We are planning to launch a Facebook group page for KCRS. This will help us keep you informed and also it will be a place where KCRS members can easily communicate with the trustees and with each other. It will be a “closed” group, meaning that content will be monitored and only invited members (i.e. you) can post messages. It will be your choice as to whether or not you want to join the KCRS Facebook group; we will also continue to use email and our website to keep in touch with members.

Newsletter, July 2018

It was exciting to get official charity status in June and to have such a successful launch event with so many local people showing support for our ambition to resettle refugee families in Kingston. It would be wonderful if we could just flick a switch to have our first family arrive in Kingston. Life’s not like that – there’s a lot of work to be done first. Our prime ambitions are finding accommodation, fund-raising and getting Home Office permission to resettle refugee families but, as well as trying to move forward on each of those, we have been getting to grips with some of the background tasks that go alongside achieving our objectives. Here’s a sketch of what has occupied the attention of KCRS trustees since our launch in June.

KCRS in the news

The 6/June launch event for KCRS was reported in the Surrey Comet. Additionally, Liberal Judaism, which enthusiastically supports Community Sponsorship, featured the involvement of Kingston Liberal Synagogue in KCRS in its on-line news. The Jewish Chronicle, which has national print circulation, also reported the launch.

KCRS website

KCRS member, Sam Alston, has volunteered to look after our website. Sam has now had some training with the software that runs the website and has plans for expanding its content.

KCRS membership

KCRS membership has grown since our launch. In particular, Kingston Quakers, Kingston Methodists and Kingston Liberal Synagogue have applied for organisational membership.

GDPR

As a registered charity, KCRS  is obliged to meet a variety of regulatory requirements. One of these is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) whose main purpose is to ensure the confidentiality of personal information. GDPR considers photographs of people to potentially be personal information so, to be compliant with its regulations, we have deleted those launch event photographs in which faces (other than those of the speakers) were clearly visible.

Bank a/c

Being a registered charity makes it easier for KCRS to open a bank account. Our application to do so with a local bank was very recently approved. Having a bank account will help with fund-raising and we hope to see a donate button here soon!

Finding accommodation for refugee families

Finding suitable and affordable accommodation is a big challenge. We are organising a brainstorming meeting of those people who attended the KCRS launch event and indicated that they would be willing to get involved in searching for accommodation. If you ticked that box on your KCRS membership form then you should have received an email message about this meeting. If you didn’t tick that box but do want to be involved then contact KCRS us here. 

Fund-raising

We have drafted a fund-raising strategy and have reviewed this with the support group Kingston Voluntary Action (KVA) whose mission is to advise local voluntary groups such as ourselves. Expect to see more details about fund-raising in our next update.

Kingston featured in Refugee Summit

On 29/June, the community organising charity, Citizens UK, held a “refugee summit” in central London. Part of the day’s agenda was to launch a campaign to urge extension past 2020 of the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme (VPRS).  As part of the campaign launch, the meeting celebrated significant contributions to refugee resettlement. Kingston councillor Fiona Boult received a certificate recognising Kingston’s contribution – being the first borough to agree to participate in the VPRS scheme and, more recently, hosting events to encourage community sponsorship. KCRS was represented by its chair, having been invited as one of the newly formed community sponsorship groups.