West Midlands community groups to receive more than £40,000 to celebrate Windrush Day

Building on the success of the past two years, in which 13 projects celebrating the British Caribbean community’s culture and heritage were supported by the Windrush Day Grant Scheme, four projects across the region will receive £42,720 this year from the Government.

Those groups are the Wolverhampton-based Citizens for Change, Birmingham Museum Trust, Equality and Inclusion Partnership and Telford African & Afro-Caribbean Resource Centre.

Citizens for Change will receive £5,200 to pay for a community allotment project to enable the Windrush generation to pass on knowledge and skills about plants, cultivation and cooking, with a celebratory event. The project will be carried out at Heath Town Allotments which are based in the heart of the New Park Village estate in Wolverhampton.

Birmingham Museum Trust will receive £10,078 to commemorate the Windrush generation through four short films and interviews; a schools learning resource supported by the digitisation of The Birmingham Black Oral History Project; and an online lecture as part of the Museums on Demand programme.

Equality and Inclusion Partnership, also known as Equip, will receive £14,692 to fund a series of workshops in Warwickshire; gathering creative materials that celebrate, share and illustrate the journey of the Windrush generation to the UK, culminating in an exhibition or event.

Telford African & Afro-Caribbean Resource Centre will be awarded £12,750 for specially designed thank you cards to Windrush elders, a Windrush Day celebration, a Windrush themed art competition and school workshops documenting Windrush oral histories.

Learning and engagement manager at the Birmingham Museums Trust, Lynsey Rutter said: "We’re delighted to be sharing experiences of the Windrush generation through a community led live digital event full of storytelling, music and poetry.

"We’ll also be giving audiences the chance to learn more about the history of Black communities in Birmingham in an online lecture.

"Finally, we’ll be digitising and making Windrush memories from the Birmingham Black Oral History project available as a learning resource for the first time."

The first Windrush Day took place in 2019 and is now held each year on June 22.

On June 21, 1948, the MV Empire Windrush docked at the Port of Tilbury from Jamaica, bringing workers from the Caribbean - alongside several others - to help fill post-war UK labour shortages.

Passengers disembarked a day later on 22 June 1948 – hence why this has come to be known as Windrush Day.

The Windrush generation are referred to as people who arrived in the UK, between 1948 and 1971, from Caribbean countries.