‘Aid Box Community is a Bristol-born charity like no other’

It’s been just over six years since I first visited the refugee camp in Dunkirk, Northern France. The one at the end of the Channel Tunnel.

The Calais Jungle was growing ever more hazardous so families and vulnerable people fleeing the escalating conflicts in the Middle East found themselves barely surviving in a football pitch in one of Dunkirk’s more well-to-do suburbs.

It seemed weirdly fitting. Dunkirk was a normal European commercial port, until nearly 340,000 British and French soldiers were evacuated to safety between May 24 to June 4 1940.

But, for all its importance in World War II – and, therefore, the impact on all our civil liberties and freedom – I’d never intended to visit.

That is until this sports field had filled with nearly 3,000 people from many countries suffering their own devastating wars, needing their own evacuation in the winter of 2015 and 2016.

The knee-deep mud can be quickly recalled, as can the makeshift school, the quivering, torn tents, the gendarmerie with their machine guns at the field entrance.

I also remember the busyness in a place so void of infrastructure – and how it was all offset by the strangely familiar lilt of Bristolian voices communicating across a backdrop of global languages and children crying.

I was there with Aid Box Convoy, now known as Aid Box Community, a truly Bristol-born charity like no other. A charity formed from a deeply humanitarian response as wars worsened and natural disasters displaced great swathes of populations.

If you’d told me then what the next six years of living in the UK was to look like, I’m not sure I’d have believed you.

What I did – and still do – believe from that first visit was that in the middle of desperation one thing always brings light into darkness: hope.

Hope. A small word that moves mountains in the minds and hands of strong, fearless people driven by a need to ensure that basic humanity and human rights are afforded to everyone – especially those most in need.

I’ll never forget the first time I met Imogen McIntosh, the woman who led the charge, created the convoys and went on to found Aid Box Community, the charity she still heads up with the same fierce passion and love.

Both she and Joby Andrews were the instigators of (at least) hundreds of everyday people packing up boxes of aid and travelling in five-day convoys to hand out, help, hold and heal in the freezing fields of Northern France.

As a journalist and professional communicator, she brought me on to the team to help grow media awareness for the cause and I went on to be a founding trustee of ABC when we became ‘official’ in 2016.

But why tell all this now? Well, January 31 2022 is my last day as chair of the ABC board of trustees and, indeed, as a trustee altogether. As I came into the ABC journey writing its story, it feels right I mark this occasion in the same way.

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ABC is now a thriving, stable organisation built on the strength of its whole community and hundreds of incredible volunteers.

Out of the darkness of Dunkirk, we moved back to Bristol and have since provided support, supplies and sanctuary for thousands of refugees and asylum seekers in this city and beyond.

The service is needed more than ever. Along with the pandemic, the recent situation in Afghanistan is proof of how interconnected we all remain to the world’s perilous challenges.

Again, Bristol rose to the call and ABC alone has supported hundreds of displaced Afghans, having fled with nothing, find some level of comfort and basic dignity far from home.

But hope, and its change it can create, does not just land in your lap. You must identify it, run toward it. You must believe that, as a society, we can do better.

It was the image of the little boy Alan Kurdi washed up on the beach on September 2 2015, that made Imogen and so many others rise from and take action away from their own families and personal comfort.

Having lived this for over half a decade now, however, I believe the fight is no longer only on the beaches and in the fields and nor is it just in red tape. It is in our very philosophy. It is in who we are becoming as a nation.

ABC has never been a political organisation, but you do not have to have a political alignment to know what injustice looks like.

Injustice is making laws quietly that can strip people of their citizenship, it is passing bills that breach human rights in the name of ‘fairness’, it is robbing people of their dignity in the cover of darkness, it is dramatically increasing the detention of trafficked women.

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Read many UK newspaper headlines, and you would think we are inundated with refugees and granting asylum without a second thought.

Never mind all the benefits that mean when – if – they reach our shores refugees live in palatial surroundings, wanting for nothing.

The truth is that we rank 14th in Europe – way behind Germany, Spain, France and Italy, for intake of refugees. In the year ending 2021, the UK received just over 37,500 asylum applications and it’s estimated there are less than 4700 ‘stateless persons’ across the whole of the UK.

In fact, four out of five people stay in their region of displacement and consequently are hosted by developing countries. Turkey, for example, has around 3.7m refugees. In total, the UK has less than 140,000.

As for the endless benefits? Well, not counting the record numbers (around 23,000) of traumatised people we currently have locked up in detention centres, when people are allowed to stay, they do not have a choice of where they live and so end up in housing stock that is very hard to let – and therefore inhabit.

They are not allowed to work until their status is accepted and yet ‘cash support’ is set at £39.63 a week – just over a fiver a day for food, hygiene and clothing.

The stories you hear from the ABC service users range from utterly heartbreaking to unimaginably terrifying.

Yet, ABC has created a place and service in which they can find true refuge, to receive basic items most of us take for granted, to rebuild some level of dignity and sense of belonging.

I’m not omitting the complex and difficult nature of how hard these issues and times are or how many inequalities there are to address in general.

But I know that solving it starts with believing it can be done. It needs hope. For anyone who wants to find it, ABC is a great place to start.

Sarah Rice is the outgoing chair of the Aid Box Community board of trustees

Main photo: ABC

Read more: Refugees in Bristol share their stories

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