A partnership between Durham and a local charity is helping unaccompanied asylum-seeking children to take steps towards independence through a shared love of cricket.
Handcrafted is a north-east charity that works with people experiencing the care system, with mental and physical health conditions, substance issues, offending histories and unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.
They meet people at points of most chaos and support them to take their own steps towards independence.
It is the charity’s work with unaccompanied asylum-seeker children that found a breakthrough moment when, as part of regular activities, they started to play cricket at a park in the shadows of the Seat Unique Riverside in Chester-le-Street.
“We flirted with different sporting ideas. There hadn’t been a lot of uptake until we started doing work with our unaccompanied asylum seekers,” Harry Jennings, who is the director for young people at Handcrafted, said.
“A lot of the children are from Afghanistan. We’ve got a lot of young people who are very interested in cricket, who get excited at the ideas of the big names that Durham have in terms of Ben Stokes and others that they saw [on TV] in Afghanistan and suddenly they’re in the same place as where these people are playing.”
It made sense, then, that a partnership with Durham should be struck. The club, which won the ‘Most Welcoming and Inclusive Stadia’ award last year was immediately forthcoming.
“We had outreach from Durham Cricket, and we’ve taken the lads to two different games, including a women’s ODI last summer which was good for seeing different forms of cricket that the lads might not have seen before,” Jennings said.
“Just seeing the integration that can have, because we’ve got a load of guys that don’t speak a lot of English that can still feel isolated, but the things that were put on from Durham Cricket, the spectators, and the community that was raised was beautiful.”
Key to cricket’s success with these young people has been the familiarity it has provided between life in the UK and where they had grown up.
Jennings believes the “safety and familiarity” is what appeals to the children the most because “the experience these young lads have had is very chaotic”.
“They are very interested in playing cricket because that’s what they were used to doing growing up and so we wanted to mirror that as much as we could,” Jennings said.
“They’ve been through a lot in the last few years yet the constant to them has always been their love of cricket. Where there’s so much chaos for these guys, any crumb of comfort and consistency that they can find, they want.
“In County Durham where most people speak English, you don’t need a lot of English to say ‘out’ or ‘howzat’ or even ‘catch’ – which was said a lot and succeeded at rarely! That sense of safety has been really valuable.”
On the pitch Jennings admits the staff at Handcrafted might not quite stack up ability wise, but more than make up for it in the enjoyment of seeing the children react to the experiences.
“Unfortunately we’re not going to win any awards for setting up an academy,” Jennings joked.
“But what we are good at is having fun! We want to be a stepping stone. We’re not going to be a substitute for other things [like organised club cricket], but we are going to be that base level where everyone’s able to be involved.
“We’ve had people who’ve come who have good levels of cricket. We’ve got some people who aren’t that sure how to hold the bat or the ball. It’s more about how we’re coming together and having fun’.
To that end of acting as a stepping stone, and with Handcrafted’s aim to empower people to take steps towards independence, some of the young people that Handcrafted work with joined a local cricket club and started playing club cricket this summer.
One young person who has been coming to Handcrafted for over a year and a half and said that cricket was their “favourite sport” and that it has helped them since arriving in the UK.
As part of the framework that Handcrafted provides, they’ve also done a range of activities and help to cook a meal every week for other unaccompanied asylum-seeking children at Handcrafted’s Chester-le-Street hub.
But they’re very clear – cricket remains their favourite activity.
By Joe Boaden, ECB Reporters Network