The Embrace Partnership

The Embrace Partnership was formed to promote good relations between different cultures and communities and to stop racial harassment. To do this, the partners work together to listen and respond to the needs of communities in southern Oxfordshire, particularly people from ethnic minority groups. You can download a leaflet summarising the work of the partnership from the right-hand side of this page (it is available in English, Chinese and Polish).

Who is involved in Embrace?

Partners include:

• Vale of White Horse District Council
• South Oxfordshire District Council
• Soha
• Oxfordshire County Council
• Oxfordshire Equality and Human Rights Council
• Thames Valley Police
• Citizens Advice Bureaux (CAB)
• Oxfordshire NHS

What initiatives has Embrace been working on?

Engaging with ethnic minority food businesses in southern Oxfordshire

Over the past three years, the Embrace partnership has been sending newsletters to people who own and/or work in ethnic minority restaurants and take-aways in southern Oxfordshire. The newsletters aimed to provide useful and practical information for these businesses about local services and opportunities. They were a direct response to requests from take-away and restaurant owners in Abingdon and Didcot for more information about how local services can help them. All the newsletters we published are available to downloaded from the right-hand side of this page.

Since the newsletters started, new sources of information about local services have become available. Embrace no longer feels that its newsletters are needed and has therefore decided to stop producing them.

We have informed the businesses about this and have also given them information about the different ways they can continue to receive information about local services. In addition, the Vale's community safety team are now sending copies of their newsletter to these ethnic minority businesses to help keep them up to date on community safety issues.

The Embrace consultation panel

The panel aims to give people from ethnic minorities who live in Southern Oxfordshire the opportunity to express their views on the provision of services within their community.

If you live in the Vale (or South Oxfordshire) and would like to volunteer to join the panel, please contact us on 01491 823093.

The results of the panel consultations will give Embrace Partners the opportunity to understand if their services are meeting the needs of the wider ethnic minority community.

Identifying and engaging with support networks for people from ethnic minority communities living in southern Oxfordshire

Embrace is in contact with a number of groups and organisations that support people from ethnic minority communities who live in the Vale or South Oxfordshire, raising awareness about Embrace and the services that the partner organisations provide. This work is on-going.

If you are involved in a group that supports people from ethnic minorities who live in the Vale or South Oxfordshire (the group doesn't necessarily have to be based in these districts), Embrace would really like to hear from you. Your group may be able to help us get information out to these residents about local services and opportunities. Please get in touch with the council's equalities officer, using the contact details on the right of this page.

For more information about Embrace, please download the partnership's leaflet from the right hand side of this page.