Storytelling for greater inclusion with TogetherintheUK

The UK’s foreign-born population increased from about 5.3 million in 2004 to nearly 9.3 million in 2018. I personally contributed to this statistic. But moving from the US to the UK was not a great difficulty (although the home office paperwork isn’t a cakewalk for anyone). I know that for many, especially where there is a language barrier, it can be incredibly difficult to navigate the new economic and cultural landscapes when they finally reach the UK.

TogetherintheUK is a social enterprise that was created in 2015 to share stories from migrants living in the UK, so that others could learn to live more included lives from people who had made similar journeys. Six years on they share migrant stories through their blog, podcast and research reports.

This year they launched a writing competition for first and second generation migrants to share their stories through a poem, short story or essay. And in our January Coffee with a Cause gathering Alan Thompson, a Founding Member of MarketingKind, led us in exploring how to make TogetherintheUK’s writing competition an annual event to remember and one that highlights the voices, insights and talent of migrants and their powerful stories.

Three months on from our Coffee with a Cause I caught up with Teresa Norman, Co-founder of TogetherintheUK and she said, ‘We’ve had an extraordinary amount of support. When we came to you we had about 30 entrants in the writing competition and when it closed at the end of April we had 67, which for our first year is a huge result. Many of the entries are incredibly powerful stories and we’re now following the advice from the group and working out how to get them published.

‘MarketingKind members have helped us to rewrite the rules of the competition and suggested changes to our communications, changing the language we used to describe the competition to make it more accessible, inclusive and engaging. Lucia Laurent Neva also gave us social media lessons in how and when to post on social media to get the best traction’. 

‘And most importantly for our long-term success we’ve been working with Alan Thompson and Andrew Mulholland on shaping a new strategic direction for our organisation, by identifying and articulating the value that we can bring to businesses and why they should sponsor our work.

‘Alan gave us the nudge that we needed to be thinking about sponsorship in our first conversation with him and over several weeks Andrew and Alan have helped us to create an effective pitch deck and we’re now having conversations with interested sponsors with more news to follow.

‘Sponsorship will help us to create a published book from the writing competition entries, celebrate the winners at our awards ceremony and support the creation of an uplifting short film about the Windrush generation and how communities change lives.’

TogetherintheUK have scheduled the writing competition awards ceremony for July 8th and we’ll keep you posted as things further develop on their work with businesses, their book publishing and short film creation.