A large-scale patchwork quilt by the South London Refugee Association’s Women Group is on display at Museum of the Home as part of GEM’s How We Build Home project.  The quilt is accompanied by a zine featuring interviews, photographs and poetry. Between April 2020 and July 2021, the group met weekly online to support and care for each other, be creative and organise for change within the UK’s hostile immigration system.

SLRA Women Group Manifesto:
We are a group of excellent women and we want change!
We want to live functional, active, and productive lives.
We want our independence, freedom, and justice.
We will continue to draw attention to these!
Fighting against injustice, racism, inhumanity, gender and sexual discrimination,
and to end hate crime!
We fight for what we stand for. We fight for our cause, and we fight against waiting
in insecurity and endless uncertainty.
And we will reach this in togetherness.
We want to feel uncompromised and protected, to help each other, to be creative
and to have space for self-development.
We deserve to be able to care for our families and offer the best for our children.
We deserve to be treated with respect and kindness.
We as a women group hear our voices, see our needs to access our basic rights to housing,food and safety.
And finally, we all deserve a good vacation.

South London Refugee Association (SLRA) is a front-line community organisation providing specialist advice and support to refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants who are at risk or in crisis because of past trauma or restrictions related to their current immigration status. They have been working in South London since 1991 and have a range of community engagement groups including the weekly Women’s Group.
Please link in social media and other communications: https://www.slr-a.org.uk/ and our twitter handle is @SLRACharity

SLRA Women Group:
The SLRA Women Group is a safe and empowering space for all women going through the immigration process. Many of the members have experience of destitution as a result of insecure immigration status. Our sessions cover mental health peer support, creative projects, community activism around migrants’ rights, intersectional feminism, campaigns in South London and much more. We value our members' different backgrounds, cultures, languages, and skills and welcome everyone to participate and share their knowledges.

SLRA Quarantine Quilt:
When lockdown hit in March 2020, SLRA moved their weekly women’s group online for over one year. The quarantine quilt was conceived as a project that the group members could work on collaboratively, despite physical separation. A volunteer team organised donations of sewing materials, which were distributed to over forty women across London. Over the next year, the women’s group members worked on their own quilt pieces from until spring 2021, when the pieces were collected and sewn together into the amazing masterpiece exhibited here.

Displaying a wide variety of sewing techniques – including applique, weaving, embroidery – and conveying the individuality of each member, the pieces are both visually and thematically diverse. They speak of the women’s frustration with the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ policy for migrants and experiences of racism, the experiences of living through a global pandemic, and challenges of motherhood in inadequate temporary accommodations, but they also speak of community, hope, resistance, change and a collective struggle for justice.

Throughout history, quilts have symbolised connection, particularly in all-female spaces, and working on this joint project helped the women’s group to overcome the isolation of lockdown. The quilt, and the stories behind it, reflect a space of compassion and joy, and feeling of strength in togetherness, created by the women’s group community.

SLRA Women Group Zine:
We spoke to the women who participated in the project about what the quilt symbolises for them, what inspired them to make their pieces and what their hopes are for the future. The resulting artwork and the stories behind the different quilt pieces are as diverse as the members of our group themselves. Together with poetry, images and artwork and material from Women Group sessions, these words are collected in the SLRA Women’s Group Zine.