Tis the season for mince pies, cosy jumpers and that one relative who brings up the asylum system between courses.
If you are armed with our Guide to Difficult Conversations, you can navigate conversations about the 'hotel' accommodation system with kindness, clarity and facts. Consider it your festive survival manual - linked in our bio. 🎄
This is our COB Community. All across the UK we stand in solidarity with people who have been displaced and shout WELCOME from the rooftops.
A lot of our services are online - an intentional decision, because it means we can stay with people seeking asylum as they are dispersed around the country by the Home Office.
This makes us one of the only services in the UK that stands alongside people throughout their journey: from arriving in the UK to being granted refugee status (and beyond), offering stability and friendship during a tumultuous time.
Love a map? You can also see it on the cover of our 2025 Impact report. Go check it out (linked in our bio).
Over 13,000 people and 62 organisations have signed our Open Letter to the Home Secretary, calling for Safe Homes, Not Hotels.
People seeking safety on our shores have been thrust into cruel and unsafe "hotels", managed by private companies, who profit millions from government contracts designed to keep asylum seekers living in misery.
Enough is enough.
We have the solutions - we just need the government to listen.
We're calling for Yvette Cooper to meet with our campaign team - who have all lived in the "hotels" themselves - and hear our demands, and our solutions.
Will you join us? Add your name through the link in our bio.
#SafeHomesNotHotels
6 years of the COB community 🥹🥹🥹
Six years of friendships, language learning, advocacy and "standing on the right side of history".
COB started as a bedroom project during COVID, with no money, no connections, but a lived understanding that we need community around us to overcome trauma.
Six years later, we're a network of thousands of people seeking asylum, volunteers and supporters across the UK.
We've delivered 30,000 1-1 English classes, built friendships that have lasted since the very beginning, developed support services for young people, women and LGBTQ+ people, distributed hundreds of laptops and phones, campaigned nationally and supported people into their first jobs in the UK.
We are so grateful to everyone who has been part of this journey - past, present and future. 🫶
p.s. all the clips sent in to us resulted in a film over 20 minutes long... shall we release the full thing!?
Our young people are the future generation, who have the opportunity to build a UK rooted in care and compassion for people fleeing war and danger.
Our Messages of Welcome workshops bring lived experience speakers into schools and universities to explore the asylum system through creativity and conversation.
If you’d like to host a workshop at your school, college or university, get in touch at [email protected] 💌
Can't do that? Reach out to your old school and ask them to bring us in, using the free email template linked in our bio.
Change can start anywhere, and no one is too small to make a difference. 🧡
🎉 Conversation Over Borders is 6 years old today 🎉
Six years of community, solidarity and friendship across borders.
What started as a small volunteer-led initiative has grown into a community supporting refugees and people seeking asylum through:
💛 English mentoring & befriending
💛 refugee-led language courses
💛 wellbeing programmes
💛 digital inclusion
💛 lived experience leadership and advocacy
We’re so proud of everything this community has built together.
Thank you to every volunteer, supporter, partner, staff member and community member who has been part of the journey - and especially to the refugees and people seeking asylum whose leadership and resilience continue to shape COB every day.
Here’s to the next chapter ✨
Brighton has always proudly stood for compassion, solidarity and community. That’s why Reform UK’s proposal to target Green-voting areas like Brighton for migrant detention centres should concern all of us.
Using people seeking safety as a political weapon - and threatening communities based on how they vote - is dangerous and divisive politics.
Conversation Over Borders is born and proudly based out of Brighton - in a city where our community was able to ignite and quickly grow due to the values of our constituents.
Brighton is known as an inclusive safe haven. Proudly the first (and, for many years, only) Green constituency, and the gay capital of the UK, it has for many years been a city full of art and activism, where likeminded people come together and many marginalised by the broader system come to feel at home.
The people of Brighton overwhelmingly stand for dignity and humanity. We stand with refugees and people seeking safety, and against divisive policies targeting them. ❤️
Volunteers - we need YOU 🌈
We’re looking for a few friendly faces to join our IRIS (LGBTQ+) Online Group as volunteer facilitators, helping to create safe, welcoming spaces for people seeking asylum in the UK.
🗓️ Tuesdays, 4–5:30pm (weekly but fortnightly commitment)
You’ll help facilitate or co-facilitate sessions and support a warm, inclusive space where everyone feels comfortable being themselves.
This is an LGBTQ+ community space, so we’re looking for volunteers who identify as LGBTQ+ to get involved.
Interested or curious? Drop us an email [email protected] 🧡
We stand with @rainbowmigration , @microrainbow and 100+ other organisations supporting LGBTQIA+ refugees and people seeking asylum in condemning recent reporting by the BBC that positions a small number of people taking advantage of the asylum system as representative of a systemic issue.
The future generation will shape the world we live in so let’s help them build a kinder one 💛
Our Messages of Welcome workshops bring the real experiences of people seeking asylum into schools and universities, creating space for students to learn and build messages of solidarity and welcome.
We believe the next generation can grow to be more compassionate, more informed and more understanding if we give them the opportunity to learn.
You can help make that happen.
Contact your old school or university using the email template in our bio and ask them to host a workshop. It only takes a minute and it could open the door to hundreds of students hearing these stories.
Email [email protected] if you have any questions!
For people rebuilding their lives after fleeing danger, stability matters.
New immigration rule changes mean that many refugees in the UK will now only be granted 30 months of refugee protection at a time, requiring them to reapply again and again to stay and their traumatic experiences being continuously reassessed.
Learning a language, finding stable work, studying, and building community doesn’t happen overnight but how can people truly put down roots when their right to stay is always temporary?
A system built on constant reapplications and longer waiting periods, whilst requiring proof of integration into British society, works to actively inhibit people from securely settling and fully participating in life in the UK.
People seeking safety deserve compassion, dignity, and the chance to rebuild their lives, not a future defined by endless waiting.
The government had an opportunity to design a fair system that supports people fleeing war and persecution. Instead, they are once again pandering to hostile anti-migration narratives echoed by the far-right, a vote that they’ll never win.
Grateful for the opportunity to run this nature mandala and wellbeing workshop with IRIS (the LGBTQIA+ support group for refugees and asylum seekers at @conversationoverborders ) a couple of weeks ago.
It was a such a lovely afternoon and everyone got fully involved to create some beautiful pieces. Thank you for having me and hope to be back again soon! ✨
