As part of our ongoing work exploring migrant economic justice in the UK, we are launching a new series of monthly community storytelling workshops focused on experiences of work, career progression, and economic inequality.
Many migrants arrive in the UK with qualifications, professional experience, specialist skills, and leadership potential, yet continue to face barriers that push them into low-paid, insecure, or undervalued work. Professional experience gained abroad is often overlooked, qualifications remain unrecognised, and navigating systems of accreditation, employment, and progression can be difficult without access to information, support, or networks. These barriers can lead to long-term underemployment, financial insecurity, loss of confidence, and wasted professional potential despite migrants making significant contributions to the economy, culture, and wider society.
Through this storytelling series, we want to create a supportive and reflective space where migrant communities can come together to share lived experiences, exchange knowledge, and collectively explore what it means to rebuild careers and navigate systems of work and opportunity in the UK. Across the coming months, participants will explore themes including migration expectations, disrupted careers, unrecognised qualifications, underemployment, language barriers, bureaucracy, blocked progression, and exclusion from leadership opportunities. Alongside these challenges, the sessions will also highlight resilience, creativity, solidarity, and the many ways migrants continue to adapt, organise, and contribute despite systemic inequalities.
The workshops will be facilitated by artist and educator Alicja Rogalska, whose collaborative practice explores labour, social structures, participation, and collective futures through art and public engagement. This work forms part of a longer-term commitment to amplifying migrant voices, challenging economic inequality, and building collective conversations around work, dignity, visibility, and justice. Stories and reflections shared through the project may contribute to future creative outputs, exhibitions, publications, and community-led advocacy developed collaboratively with participants.
At the heart of this work is a simple but urgent message: migrants are MORE THAN A WORKFORCE! They are people with knowledge, skills, experience, creativity, ambitions, and leadership potential.
Project funded by Borrow Carbury Trust