About the Project

Migrant Access Points (MAPs) are the points of access to essential services used by migrant communities. These access points have the opportunity to make links with Community Organisers to enable increasing migrant communities capacity to support and enable  community members to access services appropriately. 

Aim

The aim of the MAPs is to alleviate pressures on public sector organisations where migration and new arrivals to Leeds has impacted the most. The project works in partnership with other agencies and organisations who are equipped with the skills, experience and knowledge, and will complement the objectives and outcomes of this project.

Key Themes

The focus for Leeds is to reduce pressures on the following five key themes:

1. Housing
2. Employment
3. Education
4. Financial Inclusion
5. Health
   1. (Health - Pathways)
   2. (Health – Mental Health)
   3. (Health – Wellbeing and Lifestyles)

Click on the following links to find out more about the Migrant Access Points Project:

Community Organisers Training Programme - Summary

Who are migrants?

How can we get the right information to communities?

This information was gathered at the Social Care Community Forum on Migration and Citizenship in a changing community held on 2^nd March 2010.

 Objective 1:

- To develop and deliver the Migrant Community Organisers Programme

Intended Outcomes for this objective

1. Recruitment of Community Organisers from key migrant communities who will be trained on the city’s Health Educators Model
2. Increase migrant communities capacity to support and enable community members to access services appropriately

The attached documents are relevant for Cohort 1 of the Community Organisers Training Programme. These include the core modules training and the specialist sessions on the five key themes.

Poster

Roles and responsibilities

How to run sessions

Training exercise:

number 1

number 2

number 3

Feedback from Community Organisers on the personal development training sessions

Timetable for specialists training for Group 1

Objective 2:

- To develop links to key services working with migrant communities, and deliver appropriate advice and information sessions on these services; housing, mental health, financial inclusion, health, employment and education.

Intended outcomes for this objective

1. Increased capacity of community based support mechanisms to relieve pressure on mainstream public sector services
2. Enhanced pathways into migrant communities through increased migrant understanding and awareness of local government and services
3. Strengthened community relations between migrant and settled communities

For more information regarding Objective 2 please see the following link:

Housing Options

Objective 3:

- To develop an awareness of support services through citywide directories.

Intended outcomes for this objective

A number of organisations have identified benefits from a directory of agencies across the city where customers can be signposted or advised on activities/sessions being held. This resource would be useful to all organisations in the public, private and voluntary sectors.

The directory sub group which represents various voluntary organisations, Leeds Central Libraries and Leeds City Council carried out an exercise to establish what directories were known to them, which ones were most useful and if they had their own internal directories. 

The aim is to develop an awareness of these directories to those organisations that deal with queries from migrant communities on a day to day basis, as well as making communities aware of them.

This project also links in with another project which aims to find the five most needed languages in Leeds, this potentially could be where translation into other languages will be considered.