Our Mission

Babel’s Blessing is a grassroots language teaching project. We support migrants and refugees in London, and bring people together to celebrate different cultures through language learning.

We believe that inclusion and integration work both ways. It is equally important to support migrants to integrate with British society; and to encourage British citizens to welcome migrants and learn about their cultures and traditions. We do this through offering free English lessons to migrants, refugees and people seeking asylum; and simultaneously running low-cost lessons in London’s community languages.

Running these two programmes together also helps us to be more self-sufficient and sustainable, as the student fees from the evening classes pay part of the costs of the English classes.

Babel’s Blessing is a Community Interest Company, guided by a collectively written constitution. The organisation is overseen by five trustees and most of the day to day administrative work is carried out by one self-employed project coordinator. We currently have 5 self-employed teachers.

Our two teaching programmes:

ESOL

We run free weekly English classes for migrants, refugees and people seeking asylum. Our students come to us from Praxis Community Projects, a support centre for migrants and refugees in Bethnal Green; and from various providers (including Migrant Help, Care 4 Calais, Hestia’s Modern Slavery, and many more besides), who refer onto us people seeking asylum. We work with adult students of all ages from a wide variety of backgrounds, ethnicities and first languages.

At present, all of our ESOL classes are running online. This was initially in response to the Covid pandemic in March 2020, but we have since established that many of our students - in particular, those seeking asylum - prefer the online format, since it enables people who are regularly moved to connect from across the country.

We provide lessons that are practical and relevant to people's lives, giving them the vocabulary and confidence to communicate with their neighbours, access healthcare, support their children’s education, and be better placed to understand and navigate the immigration system.

We run a total of three classes for people seeking asylum, at three different levels, with students signing up via an online form.

We believe in participatory education. We invite our students to tell us what they need to learn, and we believe that our students can teach us as much as we can teach them.

Our lessons are fun and engaging. We encourage students to share their opinions and experiences, value their own languages and cultures, discuss current affairs and politics, explore commonalities and differences in linguistics and culture.

Students have also participated in various campaigns, such as the Lift the Ban campaign, calling on the government to lift the restrictions on people seeking asylum which prevent them from working.

Community Language Classes

We run low-cost community language classes, open to all, in languages spoken by migrant and diaspora communities in the UK. At present, all of our community language classes are also online, both for increased accessibility for our students with access needs, and also to encourage students from outside London. This year we are offering four languages (Latin American Spanish, Arabic, Sylheti and Yiddish). We aim to teach these languages to support our students, both in the UK and abroad, in communicating with their non-English-speaking neighbours.

Babel's Blessing was founded by Jewish activists and educators, but we are not a religious group. We have teachers and volunteers of Jewish faith, other religions and none. We used to offer Jewish cultural courses, including Bnei Mitzvah and Queer Talmud, but these courses are now being ran by our friends at The Queer Yeshiva.

All of our courses run across three different terms: from September-December, January-Easter, April-July.