Kent Cricket Community Trust: Summer Refugee Project

Kent Cricket Community Trust ran a summer program for refugee and asylum-seeking children who are in temporary accommodation in the Canterbury district. This included weekly coaching sessions delivered by the Kent Cricket Community Team, these sessions were run in the Victoria recreation ground in Canterbury.

The aim of the program was to:

• Deliver a safe summer programme for refugee children and young people, which provided a social activity away from the temporary accommodation.
• Empowers young people through engagement with the programme.
• Developed cricket skills and support he groups passion for cricket.
• Provide further opportunities for those who show a keen interest in the game or in coaching.
• Young people from 5 years through to 17 & 18 years attended, we spilt the group into two sessions at the end to best support the age groups attending. All those who attended the sessions received at KCCT bag, which included a cricket bat and ball, t-shirt, activity booklet, notepad and pen.
• KCCT and the Community Team are engaging with some of the older young people and parent chaperones who were apart of the Canterbury sessions, to access the cricket support coaching and further coaching courses.
• As a part of the program KCCT and Kent Cricket coordinated a visit to The Spitfire Ground, St Lawrence to watch Kent Spitfires vs Yorkshire Vikings. 80 asylum-seeking minors and refugee families attended from both Ashford and Canterbury. To welcome the groups, a recorded message by Hamidullah Qadri was shown throughout the day, as well as translated announcements through the match.
• Coaching sessions were also available at to those attending in the sports hall. KCCT developed activity booklets for the groups with information about Kent Cricket and The Spitfire Ground, as well as cricket-based activities. The young people were seen doing the word search while sat watching the match. The support workers stated how they will assist with the English language skills which was one of the aims.
• The unaccompanied minors from Ashford while in the coaching sessions stated that while they only have some cricket equipment, and they played with tapped cricket balls. KCCT gifted the group 12 wind balls and are looking at funding to extend the coaching sessions to other areas.

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