How we work
Our mission
Our mission is supporting Eastern European migrants who experience poverty, exploitation and social exclusion in order to help them to make choices about their lives and realize their potential as equal members of communities.
Our work strives to meet three overarching goals:
Independent and healthy living
Safe migration, housing and work
Fair access to statutory services and formal markets
Our objectives and activities
We further our mission by delivering the following objectives:
Poverty relief and homelessness prevention
Immigration services
Victim support
We deliver our objectives through the following activities:
Advice and casework – we provide individual, tailored advice and casework in the following areas: welfare, housing, immigration, money matters, family law for victims of domestic abuse.
Independent victim advocacy – our advocacy services include the following areas: domestic abuse and violence against women and girls, exploitation (women-only service), and hate crime.
Information and outreach – we strive to reach every Eastern European individual and family with information they need, and to enable access to our services for those most excluded and marginalised; our outreach includes digital legal education campaigns, drop-ins in social outlets frequented by Eastern Europeans, and dedicated workshops for community members as well as support workers from other charities and organisations.
Good practice and policy influencing – our extensive reach and experience of supporting our communities results in large body of evidence relating practice and policy. Together with targeted community consultations, our casework analysis serves as basis of recommendations for practice and policy changes, which we share through numerous advisory and membership bodies. We also work with carefully selected partners in academia and directly with decision-makers and statutory agencies to enable voice of our communities to feed to consultations and evaluation pieces.
Currently our activities are structured into four pillars that are designed in a way that ensures nearly wrap-around support for our community members in need. These pillars are:
Advice Programme - advice and casework in welfare, housing, money management and life in the UK
Advocacy Programme – independent domestic violence advocacy with family law, independent hate crime advocacy
Immigration Programme – advice and casework in EUSS, Ukrainian humanitarian protection, and family applications
Gateway – in-bound: access point, initial assessment and triage service; and out-bound: outreach, digital services, signposting.
Quality assurance
The success of our work is underpinned by stringent quality standards that govern how we provide activities to all disadvantaged community members who need them. We align with the following quality standards:
Advice Quality Standard (currently awaiting re-certification)
Office for Immigration Services’ Commissioner Level 3
Independent DV advocacy qualifications with Women’s Aid and Safe Lives
OSCE Model Quality Standards for specialist hate crime victim support services
We hold memberships of the following membership and umbrella organisations that provide us with access to specialist training and second-tier advice:
Advice UK
Children Poverty Action Group
Benefits and Work
National Homelessness Advice Services
Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association
National Association of Welfare Rights Advisers
Free Movement
Our history
The East European Resource Centre was established in 1984, developed from the Polish Refugee Rights Group set up in 1981 in response to the plight of Poles stranded in Britain during the time of Martial Law in Poland.
The gradual collapse of the Soviet bloc and conflict in the former Yugoslavia resulted in an increase in the number of refugees from Eastern European countries other than Poland seeking advice. In response, the PRRG became the East European Advice Centre (EEAC) and achieved charitable status as an association registered with the Charity Commission, later incorporated with Companies House in 2005. In 2015 we changed the name of our charity to East European Resource Centre to reflect expanding portfolio of our services.
Since its inception, our charity’s activities responded to changing needs of dynamic Eastern European migrant cohorts. We supported refugees fleeing regimes behind the Iron Wall, and later economic migrants from transforming Central Europe. Among our users were refugees from Balkan wars and Roma asylum seekers felling persecution in Eastern Europe. The European Union’s enlargement in 2004 and then 2007 marked a watershed moment when our attention turned to significantly increasing numbers of nationals from the accession states. The start of the war in Ukraine in 2022 marked a moment when our charity has returned to its roots and extended helping hand to all Eastern Europeans, many of whom yet again seek protection from conflict and destitution.