Our Second Home is a youth movement that exists for young people with refugee backgrounds to build community, become leaders, and flourish into adulthood in the place they call home.
There are thousands of young refugees and people seeking asylum arriving in this country every year. We believe in the unbounded potential of these individuals and are driven to help them thrive.
Our residential experiences and youth hubs are at the start of this journey, allowing us to create a space where we can teach leadership skills and spark ideas. With the right support, our ambition is to ensure that displaced youth can take control of their own lives.
“OSH gave me a voice that helped me to use it to share my feelings, to help each other and to help others to their own feelings. It was really important for my confidence. I wasn’t able to talk even to my friends, people would ask me questions and I would ask others to answer it. And mostly that changed here, cause most of my friends are here.” - 2022 Leader In Training
Set up in 2018, Our Second Home is the UK’s youth movement for people with refugee backgrounds; we act as a catalyst to enable displaced young people to flourish into adulthood.
Our simple idea applies a model of peer leadership and regular activity, to create a participant-led social movement. By providing the infrastructure and tools that they lack, we are unlocking the confidence and potential of hundreds of displaced young people who desperately want to integrate and succeed in their new country AND building the next generation of refugee leaders.
To do this, we are building upon decades of youth movement expertise to create a safe, communal space that enables us to teach leadership skills and empower young people through:
We have now welcomed 532 young participants originally from 47 countries and based in London, Essex, Bristol & the North East. We asked our participants to what extent they agreed with the following statements:
