The Language Exchange

Building community, not charity. Learning together, not looking down.

Our Language & Legal Literacy Exchange brings together refugees, migrants, and local residents to learn English and Arabic side by side - while sharing legal knowledge that protects us all.

It’s not a class in the traditional sense. It’s a space for exchange, solidarity, and community - where everyone is both teacher and learner.

Why we do it

Language is power and legal literacy is defence - together, they are liberatory tools.

We created this space because access to language and rights should never depend on status, money, or permission. By learning together, we dismantle hierarchies between “helper” and “helped” and build community resilience in the face of an increasingly hostile environment.

This isn’t about integration - it’s about connection.

What happens each week

Every week, we gather for two hours in a welcoming community space.
Each session includes:

• Language exchange: English and Arabic speakers teach one another through conversation, role-play, and storytelling.

• Legal literacy: We cover practical topics like housing rights, police interaction, healthcare access, and work protections - empowering everyone to advocate for themselves and others.

• Shared meal: We finish with a warm home-cooked meal, because nourishment is a right, not a luxury. Sharing food addresses food insecurity directly, but it also does something deeper - it creates friendship, trust, and belonging.
  
  

Our politics

We don’t do pity.
We don’t do saviourism.
We do solidarity.

Our approach is abolitionist - we believe that safety and justice come from communities that care for each other, not from systems that harm us. We work to build the world we want to live in now, through everyday practices of mutual aid, education, and love.