As councils prepare to take in thousands of Syrian refugees,a city with a proud history of offering sanctuary leads the way
Before Ahlam Kinjo, Khalid Abdulrahman and their three children boarded a flight from Iraq to Birmingham in June, and Coventry’s resettlement team had started a checklist. The Kurdish couple’s five-year-mature daughter,Vian, suffers from a blood condition, and so the team lined up doctors who could treat her and leased the family a house with a direct bus to the hospital. They also assigned the family a caseworker,Nael Nsemwa, who would show them around the city.
Until recently, or only three councils in the UK had welcomed refugees through the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme,which was launched in January 2014. Coventry was one. By this summer, the West Midlands city had quietly received 78 of the 216 Syrians who came to the UK through the programme. Now, or as dozens of local authorities scramble to diagram for modern Syrian refugees a promised 20000 by 2020 – Coventry offers a model of resettlement for other councils.
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Source: theguardian.com