Community development

After several consultations and community engagement activities with our beneficial communities, we came up with the concept of 'Social and Economic Community' as a support structure capable of providing tailored support to individuals, voluntary organisations and businesses. It is based on the principles of social and economic justice, fairness, shared ownership and prosperity.  

Initially, the MRU Community consisted of communities from Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, and Ivory Coast living in the UK. This was a reflection of the free trade arrangements between these four countries in the West Africa sub-region. However, as our work continue to progress and its impact felt within these four communities, other neighbouring communities became interested and asked us to also support them. During our consultations with their stakeholders, we discovered that the four communities we were supporting have many similarities in terms of their languages, culture, religion, traditional practices, experiences, and they were also very close to each other and collaborate in most of their activities. 

As a result, we agreed to extend the definition of the MRU Community to also include communities from Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, and Senegal. Recently, we have also been approached by several communities from North Africa and Latin America and we have included these communities as well in our support packages. 

The first project of the MRU Community is our "MRU Community Health and Wellbeing Hub." This Hub is divided into physical and mental health support, economic wellbeing, social wellbeing, and legal wellbeing departments. as the names suggest, each department is charged with the responsibility of providing support services geared towards relieving or solving the problems of their respective beneficiaries or assisting in becoming economically and socially active and independent. 

This project is still being developed and it has received support from the Greater London Authority (GLA) as a project with the potential or significantly reducing poverty, building resilience, and empowering deprived communities to be economically independent. development work on this project is ongoing and we will update this website as we progress.