The Liverpool Echo has featured our volunteers in Liverpool, who work alongside the Friends of Princes Park to care for the park. The piece spoke to one volunteer, Ali, about what it has meant to him. Ali moved to Liverpool from Hargeisa in Somalia, and described feeling “lost and alone” when he first arrived. Volunteering changed that. “When you are new to a city…you don’t know anything. But when you find Asylum Link, and you see the activities in it, different languages, different nationalities, you enter the population [community].” For Ali, the park also carries something of home: “Sometimes my father, may God have mercy on him, when he went to work, he would say to me, ‘Ali, come help me’. Then I would always help him, and our house became the best among all our neighbours, all green. That’s why I’ve loved [gardening] for a long time.”

This is what the project is for. As Darryl Marsden, who coordinates the work in Liverpool, told the Echo, Princes Park is “a space where a group of people that are very often marginalised, are actively shaping a popular local park.” Last week the Friends of Princes Park thanked Ali for that contribution by gifting him a snake-bark maple tree, and the group spent a sunny afternoon planting it together. It now stands among the many trees these volunteers have put down across the park. May it flourish, as Ali and so many others have found room to grow here.

You can read the full Liverpool Echo article here: https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/i-felt-lost-alone-now-33979637