Analyzing Voluntary Organizations Supporting Linguistic Communities

This assignment analyzes several voluntary organizations in the UK that provide services to linguistic minorities and limited English speakers. The assignment begins by identifying organizations such as the Community Language Support Service (CLSS), Sheffield Association for the Voluntary teaching of English (SAVTE), Citizens Advice, and Minority Rights Group International. It then delves into the various services offered by these organizations, including assistance with immigration, legal advice, financial services, consumer rights, housing issues, family matters, law and court support, health services, and access to funding. The analysis highlights the importance of these organizations in helping linguistic minorities navigate various challenges, such as understanding legal systems, accessing financial resources, and obtaining healthcare. The assignment also references relevant academic sources to support the findings, underscoring the significance of these voluntary efforts in promoting the well-being and integration of linguistic minorities within the UK.

Performance Evidence Record
Unit (s): Understand How a Voluntary Organization Meets the Needs of a Minority Linguistic
Community
Assignment 4 - Understand How a Voluntary Organization Meets the Needs of a Minority Linguistic Community
Learner:
Use this form to record details of activities or evidence (tick as appropriate)
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Unit Assessment
Criteria Performance evidence
1.1
1.2
You are asked to produce an assignment to cover the following areas:
Using the internet, your local library or what you already know, search for organisations
in your local area and find some voluntary organisations that offer services to Limited
English Speakers. You might want to search for organisations that offer help with
immigration, legal advice, help with bills, job services or how to access funding.
 Name one voluntary organisation in your area, which provides services for
speakers of your language.
 List all the different services that it provides (you might be able to phone or visit
them to find this information).
This assignment will meet the following criteria in the mandatory unit ‘Understand How
a Voluntary Organization Meets the Needs of a Minority Linguistic Community’:
Assessment Criteria 1.1 and 1.2.
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Some of the voluntary organisations of UK offering services to limited
english speakers are as follows:
1.CLSS (Community Language Support Service) for those who have
limited skills of English speaking.
2. SAVTE (Sheffield Association for the Voluntary teaching of English),
they aim to provide support and guidance necessary for developing skills of
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English language among people to make them confident, independent and
active citizens.
Citizens Advice, is a voluntary orgabization or charitable organisation with
316 branches across the nation of UK. It is headquartered in London. They
provide in terms of knowledge and confidence by serving them with
confidential advice through their online platform, face to face or over the
phone without any charges.
Voluntary organisation providing services voluntarily to Minority liguistic
group like Arabic and more
Minority Rights Group International, is an organization at international
level, with the aim of serving and securing rights of minority linguistic
group throughout the world. This voluntary organization is based in
London, UK. It has been formed in the 1969, by the group of individuals
who are activists having a feeling of concern towards minority rights that is
being violating in many countries of the world. Their aim is to integrate by
reducing these cultral gap between minority and majority in order to protect
the existence of minority among majority groups.
List of different services offered by Minority Rights Group are as
follows:
Beneficial services: This service provision aims to ensure that people
among minority linguistics should get what they are entitled to get. They
should not be in anyways deprived of any benefits or tax credits. They help
working, unemployed, parent, disabled, young and old citizens in the issues
related to benfits, benefits and insurance payment and many more related
support (Bergroth and Palviainen, 2017).
Work: Through the provision of this services, they guide arabic minority
groups who are in a job, where there are chances of some issues and
difficulties related to working environment or culture, MRG and their
volunteers seek to provide them the advice related to employment rights in
order to resolve their work related issues and difficulties (Huot and
Veronis, 2018). Such services are meant for avoiding minority worker’s
harassment on the ground of their low level of knowledge about the
national language. For example, if they are not able to understand their
work related rules and regulations and due to this they are facing problems
of unfair advantage taken from them, then such oganization like MRG
provide volunteering services to cope up with these work or job issues.
Financial services: lack of knowledge related to debt, money and credits is
considered to be hazardeous for citizen’s financial health. The dealings in
this perpsective is quite objectionable in terms of knowledge. This is due to
the reason of individual’s ending up in losing huge amount of money or
getting themselves into the debt trap. In order to overcome the problems
related to debt, bankruptcy, rent arrears, credit management, mortgage
problems, borrowed money, MRG helps people by developing plans,
remedial tools, relief orders, or financial advice in a broader sense to deal
with the like problems. They help people in how to avoid losing house and
money by reshaping their financial status.
Consumer services: Minority Rights Group also provide services to people
to protect and safeguard their interests, where the basic aim is to ensure a
fair dealing among minority with that of majority groups. For example,
here services like purchase related issues, Holidays and travelling across
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Europe after Brexit, changing mindset, postal and insurance related issues,
and many more services that consumer bought and the issues arising out of
it which is creating need for reliable advice.
Housing issues: To make minorities aware about the rights and
responsibilities related to housing issues, MRG plays an important role
through their various advisory services. Lack of knowledge among
minorities regarding how to cope up with the unreasonable threats of
eviction or how to proceed with renting out and buying house for
residential or commercial purpose is quite common. To overcome problems
of handling issues with lanlord and avoid losing homes due to the
dominance of majority effects, MRG helps in avoiding such issues to
minority groups. Such minority groups due to lack of knowledge of the
national language may find it difficult to understand the laws of the country
for a particular issue, and at that time there arise a need for some voluntary
organization who can provide consultancy services on underlying issues.
Advice on Family issues: There are many matters related to a particular
family, where the issue is concern about two individual from different
linguistic group, that is one from minority and the other from majority. In
these events, MRG, as a voluntary organization helps minorities to fight for
their rights and facilitate reasonable judgement for them (Landau, 2017).
Many more family issues, where a need for such voluntary aid is necessary
to cope up with the issues like, birth registration or education to child, death
and wills, mariage and other legal partnerships. Such voluntary
organization, that is MRG, who seeks to safeguard the rights of minorities
in order to avoid the chnaces of injustice due to linguistic differences.
Law and court support services: every human being has a right of getting
justice and being treated equally (Anderson, 2017). Under this service,
MRG make these liguistic minority group known about their rights as per
the law of the land. They educate them about how to proceed with any of
the proceedings of the court along with procedures to be followed to fight
against any discriminations, civil rights and claiming compensation for any
injurious action. Any of the issues related to the country’s legal system and
resulting legal advice has been handled over by MRG. They provide legal
assistance in an understandable way to these linguistic minority group.
Immigration services: Many people from minority linguistic group face
problems in understanding rules and regulations related to obtaining Visa of
a particular country due the liguistic differences (Berry, 2017). MRG
throughout the world is undertaking to support and advices on matters
related to obtaining Visa to Arabic and many other minority groups. MRG
provides services like facilitating staying at UK after Brexit, how to apply
for citizenship in UK, various documental and application related issue
handling, applying and getting Visas for family members and friends,
resolving many issues related to Visas, etc., All the advice related to the
issues stated here are provided by MRG for supporting minorities (Cantone,
2020).
Health services: entitlement from NHS and how these minority linguistic
group can complain if they get poor service is the matter of MRG to
provide consultation regarding the same (Hogan-Brun and O'Rourke eds.,
2019). MRG under this service, seeks to provide advisory services to
citizens belonging to linguistic minority group like, educating them about
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their rights related to health care from NHS, the procedure to be followed
for any complaint to NHS, health care charges in NHS along with direction
towards agencies who are specialists and can help them in getting more
information related to health care (Falla and et.al., 2017).
Access funding: Individuals belonging from minority group where there
are linguistic differences between majorities and minorities in the nation, so
in such cases when they need funding for their venture or personal
expenditure, they need to face financial system where they may not not be
able to understand their terms and conditions due to their limited skills and
command on the national language (Csergő and Regelmann, 2017). In this
event, MRG with the help of its volunteers who are experts and masters
having command over their mother tongue, that is British English, helps in
acquiring finance. They provide consultation services for free to Arabic
minority group in a language understandable to them.
In this way many services are provided by such voluntary organization like
MRG, citizen advice, CLSS and SAVTE to meet the needs of the minority
linguistic community.
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Performance Evidence Record (cont’d)
Unit Assessment
Criteria Performance evidence
I confirm that the evidence listed is my own work and was carried out under the conditions and context specified in
the standards.
Candidate signature: Date
Assessor/Expert Witness* signature: Date
*delete as appropriate
Internal Verifier signature (if sampled): Date
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REFERENCES
Huot, S. and Veronis, L., 2018. Examining the role of minority community spaces for
enabling migrants’ performance of intersectional identities through
occupation. Journal of Occupational Science, 25(1), pp.37-50.
Landau, D. M., 2017. The quest for legitimacy in independent Kosovo: the unfulfilled
promise of diversity and minority rights. Nationalities Papers, 45(3), pp.442-463.
Berry, S. E., 2017. Mainstreaming a minority rights-based approach to refugee and migrant
communities in Europe. Briefing, Minority Rights Group, pp.2-14. Roach, S.C.,
2017. Cultural autonomy, minority rights and globalization. Routledge.
Cantone, K. F., 2020. Immigrant minority language maintenance in Europe: focusing on
language education policy and teacher-training. International Multilingual
Research Journal, 14(2), pp.100-113.
Bergroth, M. and Palviainen, Å., 2017. Bilingual children as policy agents: Language policy
and education policy in minority language medium Early Childhood Education
and Care. Multilingua, 36(4), pp.375-399.
Hogan-Brun, G. and O'Rourke, B. eds., 2019. The Palgrave handbook of minority languages
and communities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Anderson, A. B., 2017. Ethnic minorities and minority rights in Europe: Theoretical
typologies (Vol. 99). ECMI Working Paper.
Falla, A. M., and et.al., 2017. Language support for linguistic minority chronic hepatitis B/C
patients: an exploratory study of availability and clinicians’ perceptions of
language barriers in six European countries. BMC health services research, 17(1),
pp.1-8.
Csergő, Z. and Regelmann, A. C., 2017. Europeanization and collective rationality in
minority voting: Lessons from Central and Eastern Europe. Problems of Post-
communism, 64(5), pp.291-310.
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