What is ‘welcome’?
A shared language for the sector
Welcoming starts with relationships between people: the natural human desire to feel welcomed in a new place and to welcome others.
What welcome means
When we talk about welcoming, we mean the support and conditions that help newcomers to settle, to navigate services, and to begin participating in community life.
Welcoming refers both to the practical assistance that helps people understand and navigate a new place, and to the relationships and support that build trust, connection and a sense of belonging.
Welcoming starts with relationships, but it cannot end there. It is delivered through local networks of organisations and communities, forming a wider ‘welcome infrastructure’ that shapes support.
Why build stronger systems of welcome?
Alongside welcome services, welcome spaces are crucial to a newcomer’s experience. Welcome hubs are physical spaces dedicated to welcoming newcomers, while community hubs are spaces designed to meet wider societal needs that also serve newcomers.
Welcoming happens both through formal, officially recognised groups and state-facilitated support, and through more informal, community-led support. Both are valuable, and infrastructure is essential to ensure welcoming is present across the UK, not only in areas with existing groups or histories of welcoming. This helps welcoming to be ongoing and accessible to all, rather than fleeting or restricted to certain groups.
Who are we welcoming?
The Welcome Coalition is focused on welcoming all newcomers to a place. This means anyone who has recently arrived in a new area, and the links and interactions they build with longer-standing residents. It includes international migrants (including refugees and asylum seekers) as well as workers, those who migrate for family reasons, and students.
Welcoming is about everything that happens after the moment of arrival, rather than the decisions about who should be permitted to migrate to the UK.
What about integration, cohesion and inclusion?
We use the term ‘welcoming’ because it is easy to understand and because it emphasises the connections between people, rather than solely services.
Welcoming is an umbrella term that encompasses many others in this area, including integration (broadly, the two-way process of mutual accommodation between newcomers and longer-standing communities) and community cohesion (the ties that bind communities together and trust in institutions). These terms each describe slightly different processes of arrival and inclusion, with their own strengths and limitations. We use ‘welcoming’ to reflect a starting point that focuses on the links and connections between people and communities.
Be part of the Coalition
Join the Community of Practice, the Research & Learning Group, or the Policy & Narrative Group, and help build a more connected, informed and impactful welcome sector.