Hertfordshire community provides Afghan refugees with ‘sea of donations’
The community response has been overwhelming
The community of Hertsmere came together over the weekend to welcome Afghan refugees to the UK with a host of donations at a distribution centre.
Hundreds of people from Afghansitan have come to seek refuge in the UK after their country has been taken over by the Taliban.
The emotional turmoil for those who have just entered the country is expected to have been intense for those affected, and residents in Hertfordshire have shown determination to welcome them with open arms.
After hearing that some of the refugees from the Afghan resettlement programme were going to be placed in hotels in Hertsmere, County Councillor Caroline Clapper from Hertfordshire County Council was contacted through the local synagogue and was asked to help put a collection together.
Community spirit at a high
Councillor Clapper started promoting the idea on social media, where the call for donations gained a significant amount of traction as people became eager to help out.
She said:
“I cannot even tell you how unbelievable the community response was.”
“The only way I can describe it is as a sea of donations.”
“It was so overwhelming; people were pulling up car after car, all the roads were blocked, volunteers were running bags in and out of cars into the distribution centres.
Businesses got in touch to offer spaces for collection points so that people could drop donations off during the week before the distribution centre opened on Sunday.
Going above and beyond
A Hertsmere resident even offered his house to store some of the thousands of bags that had been collected over the course of the weekend.
Thanks to the community, the volunteers and charities involved were able to create care packages tailored to individual family’s needs. Councillor Clapper noted:
“We were able to really successfully create care packages per family where we even knew the shoe sizes for children so that families would be able to open up a big suitcase full of adults clothing, children’s clothing, books, toys, toiletries, how many children there were, exactly what their wants and desires were.”
After realising that the scale of what the community had done was significant enough to go beyond just helping refugees settling in Hertsmere, Councillor Clapper started to get in touch with various charities around the area to see what more they could do.
The excess donations will now be re-distributed to lots of causes, including local charities as well as being taken further afield to Syria and Moldova to help refugees there.