Migration Matters Festival
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From Sheffield to the rest of the world, we want to bring communities together through music, art, performance, food and celebration.
Sheffield has always been the Steel City, the place of Hendos, hills, Pulp, chip buttys, industry, grit, soul and strength.
But more significantly, the city has a proud record of welcoming new people from the far reaches of the world. It’s a city which has opened its doors, and most importantly become a place of sanctuary for those people most in need. It’s this spirit that saw Sheffield become established as the first City of Sanctuary.
Every third week in June during what is known nationally as Refugee Week, Migration Matters Festival ‘Britain’s largest festival about Sanctuary and refugees in the country’ (The New Internationalist, 2017) returns to Sheffield in a festival that creates a platform to champion the voices of people who are so often muted, pigeon-holed into labels and rarely genuinely offered a chance to shape in the cultural and artistic landscape of the cities they live in.
The festival’s central aim is to bring together all the people of the city, all Sheffielders to recognise each other, and to see people not for the labels that divide us, but for the unique talents and skills that make us who we are.
For seven incredible years the festival has programmed everything from internationally renowned artists, award winning companies, spectacular dance troupes and powerful community celebrations with a strong emphasis on platforming refugees and people who have experienced displacement, detention or the UK’s inhumane asylum system. This is in addition to the events where people have broken bread together at Open Iftars, played football in intercultural tournaments, made puppets, zines, shirts, learned to vogue chi, tell stories, dance and find friendships.
