The School Bus Project, Calais
INTO Giving provided £2,000 support for converting a bus into a mobile school, and training volunteers who to work with displaced people in sheltering in the Calais 'Jungle'
How can you help?School Bus Project, Calais
INTO Giving donated £2,000 to The School Bus Project. Based in Brighton, the School Bus Project is a grass roots organisation providing education to refugees, asylum seekers and the communities who host them.
Until it was closed down in autumn 2016, School Bus focused on the Calais refugee camp known as 'The Jungle', by converting an old double-decker bus and converting it into a mobile school.
'The Jungle' in numbers (February 2016)
- Over 5,000 displaced people lived in in The Jungle, many of them fleeing conflict zones of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Others yet were trying to escape political oppression in countries like Eritrea
- 651 were children, of which 423 were unaccompanied
The School Bus Project believes, you don’t have to go to school to get an education...school can come to you!
After months of fundraising, painting and carpentry, the double-decker bus made its maiden voyage to Calais in August 2016. With help from the INTO Giving funding, School Bus Project also they developed a set of downloadable educational resources for volunteer teachers, and trained 40 volunteers to work as teachers in The Jungle.
'Not only is education an enabling right, recent research demonstrates it is a priority for refugees themselves, who see it as a driver for change that they own. We therefore believe in education as partnership.
'All our lessons are co-constructed by all participants, and we find that we learn as much from our students as they do from us. At a time when people are being thrown together by circumstance, the more we can learn from and understand one another, the stronger we will be.' -- Darren Abrahams, Founder, School Bus Project
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