Page 29 - TUNTUM 35th Anniversary Brochure

A Tuntum story 2008
Refugee Futures
In 2008, Nottingham City Council put out to tender a large contract of £427,000 per annum to provide city-wide support to the growing number of refugees, primarily from the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. Despite this being a completely new area, Tuntum decided to lead a consortium bid with two other partners. This was successful, and the new lead agency was called Refugee Futures, the name reflecting a positive approach to this specialist area of service provision.
Reductions in the contract’s size in
later years, due to the squeeze on local authority budgets, ended the consortium approach but Tuntum, as usual, carried on by itself. At its height, the service provided a comprehensive support service to over 120 refugee families each and every week.
It became a Tuntum custom every Christmas for staff, including directors and the CEO, to undertake a delivery of festive gifts to all those families and children supported by Refugee Futures.
This experience of setting up and delivering refugee support would come in very useful some years later when the Syrian refugees started to arrive.
Richard Renwick said:
“Tuntum had been working for a number of years with refugees from different parts of the world. In 2008 we got the opportunity to offer a far more complete service when we successfully tendered with Nottingham City Council.”
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