The UK received 29,456 asylum applications in 2020 (Government, 2020a). Each of these represents an individual life and with that life, like ours, comes a story and a journey.
The stories of people’s lives are fascinating, sometimes harrowing, sometimes very sad and sometimes jubilant and triumphant. Rarely do we harness these stories towards encouraging others and if we do, we look at the impact on others rather than the storyteller themselves.
The aim of this evaluation was to experientially examine the process of people seeking sanctuary becoming peer leaders through the lens of their story using a ‘hope’ theory (Burns, 2020).
The evidence suggests that validating and utilising the lived experience of a person seeking sanctuary brings hope to others, how building effective rapport is vital, how ‘peer-ness’ can be a tool in keeping individuals strong and finally how a modelled training approach (MTA) works.
(The Perthyn project ran from January 2019 for a year (‘Perthyn’ meaning ‘Belonging’ in Welsh).)
