We are thrilled to share our annual impact report with you and wanted to take a moment to express our deepest appreciation for everything you have done to support our work. 

At the start of last year our staff and Experts by Experience teams came up with two key areas of focus that would underpin our work for the year – fighting for systemic change and building partnerships. These were intended to be threads that ran throughout everyone’s work at City of Sanctuary Sheffield.

It is now a year on. And just this morning in The Sanctuary, almost as I sat down to write this, a person seeking sanctuary spoke to me about how incredible it is in Sheffield that everyone comes together – each doing their bit – to build a better world.

In this report, you will read about our role in this. You will read about people coming together to challenge the recent Rwanda detentions, and about our community fighting homelessness among new refugees. You will see that every week The Sanctuary provides a safe space for those who need it, and the Drop-In provides impactful and effective advice and signposting for the community of people seeking sanctuary. You will read about our incredible staff team and our monumental volunteer team who make all this happen.

Crucially, you will see that this is not done in isolation, but collectively with the wider Sheffield community. At City of Sanctuary Sheffield, we strongly believe that we need everyone – individuals, organisations, large institutions – to believe that systemic change is possible and to work collectively towards making it happen; because it is only together that we are strong enough to build the world we all want to see.

The person I spoke to this morning reminded me of this. My hope is that in celebrating what we have done together, this report reminds us of that too.

With love and strength,

Tom, Director of City of Sanctuary Sheffield