Glenthorne hosts virtual welcome for refugees
Welcome Project visit cancelled due to pandemic replaced by online sessions including poetry and picture tour
Glenthorne Quaker Centre in Grasmere hosted a virtual Welcome Project in conjunction with Bradford Children’s Society and the Wordsworth Trust during the Covid-19 lockdown.
The centre organised three online visits for a number of refugees despite the fact that most of the staff were furloughed. The visitors were due to come on a Welcome Project visit to the centre in May but it was cancelled due to the pandemic.
Friend-in-Residence Terry Winterton wrote in the Glenthorne newsletter that the refugees started with a video and picture tour of Glenthorne and the surrounding area. ‘In the second session, Jeff Cowton (curator, Wordsworth Trust) introduced them to William Wordsworth and his life at Dove cottage and in the third session, the writer Susan Allen (Wordsworth Trust) helped us write and compose some poetry,’ he said. They highlighted a book written by Glenthorne donor Rob David, a refugee himself: A County of Refuge: Refugees in Cumbria 1933-1941.
The centre, which plans to open again on 7 August, has also been running a daily online Zoom Meeting for Worship, which according to Terry Winterton ‘has become an important development at Glenthorne’ fostering ‘a close sense of community’ for the twenty-five to thirty-five people who take part. Terry Winterton told the Friend the opening is ‘subject to government guidelines and in the knowledge that our opening will need to be postponed if the Covid-19 transmission situation worsens’.
