Behind the scenes at Right to Remain, we have been busy contemplating and preparing for our future.

As one of the anchor organisations in the migration justice field working with people going through the asylum and immigration system and grassroots and solidarity groups, we have asked ourselves, how can we boost the migration justice movement more effectively?

To answer this question, over the last 18 months, we have been learning a huge amount about our community and also about ourselves in a variety of ways.

We re-examined our flagship Knowledge is Power sessions, the runaway success of our Toolkit Festivals, and of course the Toolkit itself. We reflected on the nature, potential and urgency of boosting legal support in our community and disseminating practical legal and other knowledge in our community and beyond. And we reaffirmed that how we we disseminate this legal knowledge is the key to our success.

We also looked back on our own history and experience of building power, including the work of These Walls Must Fall in recent years. They were and continue to be all about relationships and connections, which need a lot of nurturing and also adventures.

Having analysed the potential impact of the new law, in August, we made a critical decision to run a series of workshops, ‘Preparing our community for the impact of the Illegal Migration Act’ – as many as we can. We recognised the primacy of being with our community at this pivotal point and harnessing our collective power to respond. We also started this off by running the workshop as a whole team – we needed to feel and own as a team what it means to be doing this work.

Since spring, our team has been carrying out our organisational programme, called ‘Thinking with our community’. We have been meeting and speaking with a number of friends, old and new, across the UK to sharpen our collective analysis of our community and our environment and clarify our role in this migration justice movement.

At the end of November, our staff and Management Committee members gathered on our Strategy Day in London, to bring together these insights, to challenge and inspire each other and to start dreaming about our future.

• We reaffirmed our vision, aims and values.
• We refreshed our Theory of Change – our hypothesis of how we achieve our vision.
• We acknowledge the progress made against our strategy objectives in 2023/24 and set objectives for 2024/25 onwards.
• We identified and agreed on key organisational development objectives.

We came away form the Strategy Day energised and full of hope – hope, despite everything. We are building knowledge, we are building radical solidarity and we are building power. We are looking forward to sharing our strategy 2024/29 soon – and we hope you will come on the journey with us, as you have always done, to build a world where no one is illegal.