The Ethnic Health Forum is a Rusholme-based charity which offers a range of services to local residents. They have been working in the area for around four years, providing counselling and mental health support, health information and support with welfare benefits and employment related issues. Because of the community they work in, most of the people who use the service speak Arabic, although they are open to everybody. They also involve people as volunteers.
One day, a man in his early 20s arrived on their door step. He was Mahmoud, a refugee from a war-torn country. He said he needed support with everything, from improving his English, to finding somewhere to live to sorting out his benefits problems. Everyone at the project was amazed how quickly he progressed. Shortly after meeting them, he enrolled on an English course at a local college, and started volunteering to help other refugee clients with welfare rights and employment issues.
He also came on training with Macc to learn how to be a community reporter, using interviews and film to capture the views and experiences of local residents. Today, he has been working with Hanif at the Ethnic Health Forum to plan a project which will use these skills to carry out interviews in bars and cafes in Rusholme, to look at people’s attitudes to smoking shisha pipes. This work has been funded by the BME Network and the University of Manchester, and the results will feed in to Manchester’s Stop Smoking Strategy. Mahmoud will be involved in interviewing 8-10 people, running a group session in one of the cafes, and also developing a Survey Monkey survey so people can still contribute even if they would rather not be filmed.
For more information, see http://www.ethnichealth.org.uk/index.html