Since February 2022 over 8 million Ukrainian refugees had fled their home country following the Russian invasion.

By early 2023 over 200,000 had found refuge in the UK.

Across the UK support organisations including Job Centres, local government housing teams, Citizens Advice, leisure centers, GP surgeries, and others have faced the unprecedented challenge of assisting a substantial number of displaced refugees cope with new and sometimes complex issues that affect their families.

To help refugees gain access to the help they need a number of community projects have been held across the UK, where support organisations can gather in one location making interaction easy.

However, language barriers can make dialogue difficult. Prestige Network has helped many organisations overcome communications challenges by providing interpreters.

For two recent drop-in events organised by East Hampshire District Council, we put 12 face-to-face Ukrainian/Russian interpreters on site.

They facilitated informal verbal communications between Ukrainian families and the various support organisations who attended, answering questions about specific services, support, and activities on offer.

Prestige Network is proud to assist all of the support agencies involved in helping Ukrainian families who have been forced to escape their home country to settle in the UK with minimal stress.

Please get in touch to find out how Prestige Network can work with your council or support agency to help your local refugee community. 

Here’s what the East Hampshire Council had to say:

“I just wanted to say a big thank you for all your support with organising the interpreters for both of our events. 

All of the stallholders gave positive feedback about the interpreters allocated to them and said what an amazing job they all did. It made the event go so much smoother and without so much stress, knowing we had people there to help organisations promote their services and help the guests find information and advice where possible, and have the confidence to ask questions. 

Please pass my sincere thanks also to all of interpreters for their hard work and how friendly and approachable they were with our team, the organisations they worked with, and the visitors to the event. I tried to thank as many as I could face to face but given how busy it was, my apologies if I did miss a few. 

We will definitely be using your services again if we do something similar like this in the future.”

Gemma Vale, 

Community Project Officer, East Hampshire District Council