Meet Kerry Cressey, SAVTE

From Volunteer to Community Development Worker

Our friend Liz Buchanan met with Kerry Cressey, to hear about her journey from Volunteer to Community Development Worker in Sheffield.

I was born and bred in Sheffield. Born in the Northern General in fact! Since then I've lived in Walkley, Middlewood and now Stannington so I'm an S6 Girl.

I didn't enjoy school. It was the mid 80s & I couldn't wait to leave.  Afterwards I worked in Boots the Chemist for about four years, but I really wanted to go to America. With no qualifications, the only way I could find to get in was either Camp America or Au Pair America. I chose the second, because that way I could go for a whole year.

I could have been sent anywhere, but I got placed with a lovely family with one boy to look after in Boston Massachusetts. They were quite affluent, with a house just outside Boston and a summer-house on Martha's Vineyard just off Cape Cod. They were really nice people. I went travelling with them across the States; it was a huge adventure and one of the best years of my life.

I did some more travelling in Mexico after that and came back for good in 1994. I didn't think it was going to be for good because I'd caught the travel-bug, but I met my husband a year or so later and started to settle. I went into child-minding, but the work was unstable and just on the minimum wage.

Around that time, an African family moved onto the estate where I was living. They’d been moved from asylum housing and got a maisonette near us. I helped them at the housing office and showed them where the supermarkets were. All those things you do to help someone settle in. I decided I'd quite like to do something like that for a job. I had rent and bills to pay so I couldn't afford a University education, but I did have a bit of spare time so I thought I'd build up experience by volunteering.

In 2002 I found SAVTE (Sheffield Association for the Voluntary Teaching of English). It's an organisation that recruits and trains volunteers to help people to learn English. That's either in a conversation group community setting or one-to-one in people's homes. I applied to volunteer with them & during my time as a volunteer, helped about five women from various backgrounds learn English.

Then the post of Community Development worker came up. I applied for it and expected to get it but I didn't, so I was quite disappointed. It came up again a second time so I applied again and this time I was successful. I started work for them in May 2007.

I feel like SAVTE's been like my university. I've worn a few hats over my time there and enjoyed all of them. One thing I began to notice was that we get a lot of wonderful volunteers from the more affluent areas of town. We need and appreciate those volunteers. Most refugees however, will get placed in disadvantaged areas, so we also want to engage potential volunteers from these areas as well; we want them to know their neighbours.

Recently, I've been able to focus on recruiting volunteers from Sheffield's more disadvantaged estates and training them up to teach their new neighbours English. Our CEO, Stella, has been very much behind this approach. When she first came, a good 90% of our volunteers were from affluent backgrounds and now around 25% are from disadvantaged communities. We want to encourage more volunteers overall, from a varied demographic. The focus on increasing diversity isn't just to tick a box, but because it's important to have representation from the communities we serve.

In 2019 I applied for, and was successful in securing a research fellowship from the Churchill Fellowship. I wanted to experience other countries' approaches to involving people from disadvantaged and working class communities with the refugees that get placed there.

I went to Oakland and San Francisco in California, which was the first City of Refuge in the USA. I learned a lot about how they persevere through a very systemically hostile environment towards migrants and the ways of working they've adapted as a result. They’ve developed a good understanding of potential barriers to volunteering faced by people from disadvantaged communities. For example, people from disadvantaged communities can often be ‘time-poor’. They might have three or four part-time jobs or caring responsibilities, so it's very difficult to commit to a weekly volunteering slot. They've dealt with this by recruiting groups of people to volunteer on a rota or drop-in, drop-out basis, offering support to each other.

They also have a wide range of volunteer roles. Some might find it daunting teaching English once a week, so offering varied roles can help people with less confidence from a range of backgrounds to build up experience and progress to more involved roles. There were roles around helping a family to go shopping once a week, or showing them how to use public transport.

I also went to Amsterdam in the Netherlands, which was the polar opposite to the USA in terms of approach and attitude to migrants. In Amsterdam the local government supports integration, so there were well-funded community initiatives. I didn't come across many organisations that focussed solely on refugees because they made a point of delivering the community initiatives for everyone in the community; although were very mindful that this would aid integration for newcomers. The services were delivered by all and provided for all. They didn't differentiate.

I met two local Syrians cutting people's hair – they'd made a small hairdressers in one of the community centres and were offering reduced price hair-cuts for anyone in their community, which was around 80% social housing. The pedal-bike is a popular way of getting around in Amsterdam, so a mixture of the refugee and established communities were volunteering to repair people's bikes. There was a language cafe, where locals would come in, get a coffee and sit at a table, with the expectation that local people from the refugee community would sit at the same table and practice speaking Dutch. It was well attended by a really good mix of people.

Dutch culture and history was valued and the community centres were keen to promote key events which celebrated it. I was there on Liberation Day, which celebrates the day that the German occupation force left Amsterdam. All the community were represented. The Dutch were setting up alongside Syrians who had arrived in 2016. People were working together; it was hard to tell who was in what role at a glance.

Amsterdam was one of the best models I've seen for integration. . .

I witnessed many more initiatives which brought communities together and hope to share more of my findings in the future. I’m currently in the midst of writing a full report which I’ll publish on a website when complete. The Churchill Fellowship will also help me to promote my findings to other organisations in the UK. I hope it inspires people to get involved, to volunteer in their communities and to meet their new neighbours. You never know, it could be life changing, like it was for me…

Thanks Liz, for giving us this insight - it’s inspiring to hear how Kerry went from helping a new neighbour, to finding such a great vocation and continuing to develop her knowledge and ability to help strengthen our communities across Sheffield.

If you know an inspiring and creative Sheffielder you’d like to hear in conversation, please introduce us to them, we hope to bring many new stories to you in future editions.