“Imagine you’re in a place and you are experiencing all the minor troubles you face in day to day life, but you do not understand everything around you. You feel lonely and isolated. That is the experience of a non-English speaker in Britain.”
This is Theodora Cadbury, who set up Xenia in June 2016, an organisation aiming to unite women through English language-speaking workshops.
In 2015, at the height of the European migrant crisis, she was working as a community practitioner in the voluntary sector.
“So many people were trying to reach the UK for safety, she said. “People were rushing off to volunteer in refugee camps, but it made me reflect on what was going on here in London.”
She noticed that there were migrant women who wanted to volunteer and make friends outside their cultural group and women from the UK who wanted to help in some way, but their only option seemed to be to go abroad. She decided to get these two groups of women together to see if they could be just what the other needed.
A 2017 report from Refugee Action found that government funding for English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) in England dropped 60 per cent from 2010 to 2016. This has left many refugees and migrants feeling isolated and lonely.
Xenia’s idea was to run a workshop that gave migrant women an opportunity to practice English with native English speakers. The organisers were met with a packed room, with participants asking if there would be another workshop the next week.
Now, Xenia runs workshops in Hackney Museum every Saturday morning, with around 20 women attending.
“We are creating a community of welcome,” says Cadbury. “There is no hierarchy, and everyone is an equal. We start off in a circle and everyone gets the opportunity to speak so everyone has a voice.”
Through improving their English, Xenia aims to help women learn how to communicate confidently, but also gives them an opportunity to meet new people. “If you’re not working it is difficult to meet people, so women are being left out,” she says.
Cadbury points out one woman who found her voice through the workshops: “She is a Turkish Muslim woman who comes to Xenia frequently. At first, she was incredibly shy and never spoke but now she has been coming for a year and a half and she is always speaking and challenging people. For an ESOL assignment she had to write about something that inspires her, and she chose to write about Xenia.”
Research by the Wonder Foundation in 2016 found that speaking English is essential for integration, empowerment and economic opportunity in the UK, especially for vulnerable refugee women or women or mothers who are not in work.
“There is a huge amount of demand locally,” says Cadbury. But she explains that the sessions are not just English lessons, but rather an exercise in inclusion and integration.
“We are not a conversation club,” she says. Each workshop is structured and focused on a particular theme, which participants choose each week.
A recent session, Cadbury explains, was on the theme of relationships. Alongside discussing relevant vocabulary and language to do with family and intimate relationships, Xenia also invited a representative from a domestic violence service to speak at the session.
Through bringing someone from a local service into the session, Cadbury hopes to provide not only help with language but increase women’s access to support they might need.
Amongst the “joy, welcome and connection”, Cadbury explains, difficult experiences do come out and many of the women who take part have been through trauma.
But the key to Xenia’s success is the real range of women who take part, Cadbury explains. “I am in my late twenties and I am often one of the youngest people there,” she says. “You can talk about women’s issues – or anything else – with a really diverse group of women and it is always a two-way exchange.”
Although the workshops were set up to allow for communication between migrant women and women from the UK, Cadbury is keen to stress that this distinction is not clear cut.
“Many of our English learners are British citizens and many of our English speakers are from elsewhere,” she says. “The labels of ‘migrant’ and ‘British’ are not that simple.”
This breaking down of popular narratives around migrant women is key to Xenia’s ethos. Cadbury explains how founding Xenia has allowed her to meet many women who have impacted her life.
One of these women is Aysha, a young Sri Lankan woman who came to the UK to marry her husband, and now lives with his family in Hackney.
Aysha says how Xenia has changed her life: “I am learning a ‘sharing culture’ from women at Xenia. I tell friends back home about this culture and it makes me feel welcome in London. It is so nice to hear other women’s stories.
“Some people in London are scared of how I dress. It makes me sad and sometimes I am scared to go out because, when they see me wearing the full-face veil, they see me as separate. At Xenia, women don’t make me feel this way, they make me feel welcome. They always respect my boundaries and ask permission.
“Before Xenia I did not go anywhere by myself, but the women at Xenia made me feel safer. Now I am happy to live in London.”
Cadbury herself explains how Xenia has impacted her life: “Without Xenia I wouldn’t have these conversations. It challenges women’s views of feminism and shows that there isn’t one way to be a liberated woman.”
For online: Xenia are open to donations. Please email welcome@xenia.org.uk
