Fostering integration into the Belgian and European social fabric.
« Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person. »
SAM asbl aims to meet the needs tied to the migration journey, in both tools and support: awareness of citizenship and health, information on employment and training, help finding housing.
Psychosocial support in the face of difficulties, legal support on rights as well as duties, and social interpreting to overcome language barriers.
SAM asbl also runs social-economy projects open to everyone (community vegetable garden, clothing shop) that encourage intercultural exchange between newcomers and hosts. The goal: lasting integration in the Belgian context.
For many years, the wish to create a space for information and for listening, for asylum seekers who had left the reception centres, ran through my mind. Then time passed. Work, family, a career that kept evolving and feeding me. My project stayed in a small corner of my mind, with the thought that perhaps the moment had not yet come.
Then I reached a real turning point, with no way forward in sight. The idea resurfaced, obvious. It was the right moment. I had to take the plunge! And here we are: SAM was born.
Surrounded by friends as alive as I am to the help we can bring to migrants, each of us strengthened by our own path and our experience of the field, I pushed our fragile little boat out onto the water. Though in truth, not so fragile after all! On board: an anthropologist, an electrician, an archaeologist, a lawyer, a brilliant handyman, a passionate youth worker, a teacher specialised in adult literacy.
Quite a mix, you will say. That is precisely our wealth. What we have in common: this fierce desire to build a place of welcome, of support and of guidance, open to as many people as possible. Some of us have lived through that difficult path of starting again elsewhere, far from everything and everyone. One more asset for our nonprofit.
So I am happy, and moved, I must admit, to present to you the realisation of my project. Of our project. It takes today a far wider form than I dared hope.
Welcome to you all at SAM asbl.
