Community Spirit, Community Power: Bridgebuilding Within Gateshead’s African Communities

In November 2023 we held an event at The Glasshouse, Gateshead, called ‘Community Spirit, Community Power’. Members of the GCB team gave speeches about their experiences, their work and their ideas. These blog posts are drawn from those speeches…

Discussions at our ‘Community Spirit: Community Power’ event.

From speech by Eric Bamela:

We have several African communities living in Gateshead, along with Latina North American communities who have been relocated to the area. Between Gateshead and Newcastle, specific areas have specific communities. Bensham in Gateshead is one of the more diverse, it’s also an area in which many asylum seekers and refugees are housed. The same is true of Fenham and Byker in Newcastle.

In these three places there are churches which are important in our different communities. A very large African community comes to these churches from all sides. But these churches are not part of our communities, which create barriers because not everyone is involved. Ethnic differences cause many problems in our communities. For example, we have a group of Sudanese men who meet every Tuesday evening at Bensham Grove community centre, but are completely unconnected to the large local Sudanese community. Likewise there are Eritrean and Ethiopian groups that gather as an Orthodox Church community which is disconnected from the greater community of their countries. There are bridges to be built here.

Despite all these difficulties some communities are very well established and functioning well. This is where the idea came from to create a platform to bring together those communities who are well functioning, and look at how to integrate others who are trying to establish themselves as a community. The platform’s work can be split into two categories. Firstly, focusing on breaking all barriers between communities and building new relationships based on trust, to enable good communication with and information flow to all members of their community. The other part of the platform’s work is with the church-based communities themselves, also developing communication flows and building good relationships based on trust and – most importantly – recognising the boundary between the platform’s work and each church’s business.

We bring together all communities through a range of activities and projects. For example, we’re funning a sport and wellbeing project based around football, a digital inclusion project, a family inclusion programme, a refugee and asylum seeker programme and a project for young people who are addicted to drugs.