A Visit From the Department of Calais
The Refugee Youth Service team was very happy to welcome visitors from the Department of Calais for the first time.
On Tuesday, the 27th of April the team was accompanied by Fanny Bertrand and Céline Coche who are in charge of the Service Départemental d’accueil des mineurs non-accompagnés in Pas-de-Calais, who came to spend the day with our team in the field, and get insights into our work.
The schedule for the visit allowed our guests to become familiar with our objectives and our approach to support work. We spent the day at different living sites in Calais where we usually meet and check up on the children we support, and our team had the chance to show how our outreach and activities programme run in practice.
The importance of our focus on unaccompanied children’s needs and wellbeing was reiterated by our guests, and we were happy to see that the impact our work has on the children we meet was felt by both visitors as well.
Additionally, during the day we were able to have great discussions on some of the challenging aspects of our work which opened up for a promising discussion on the future of support work in Calais.
The visit had a very positive outcome and allowed us to share the knowledge we have gained after years of working with unaccompanied children in Calais with the department members, and we look forward to further collaboration with the department in order to improve social services for unaccompanied minors in Calais.