Faith and finances: The religious communities providing a lifeline for immigrants
- Written by Thaís Matos
- Illustration by Laura Lopez
- Edited by Ruby Russell
Finding a foothold in Europe can be an immense logistical, economic, social and emotional challenge, but some immigrants are finding a sense of home in communities bound by belief.
It’s 11:30 on a chilly Tuesday morning in south London and there are 15 minutes to go before the Newham Community Project food bank opens. Some 50 people have formed a queue around the corner on a street. “Now they have to wait here because the neighbors were complaining about the crowd,” Yeldiz Tobraz explains as the queue keeps growing. She expects about 120 people. Most are recent immigrants to the UK.
Yeldiz moves down the line handing out numbered tickets to murmurs of “Salam alaykum, thank you.” No one looks particularly pleased to be waiting for donated groceries. Some look downright uncomfortable. But Yeldiz chats and jokes, managing to raise a laugh here and there. Greeting a regular who comes every week, she tenderly tucks a loose strand of hair into the young woman’s hijab.
“You know, I was once in this position,” she says. “When I arrived in the United Kingdom, I had no passport. I was helped a lot.”
“You know, I was once in this position,” she says. “When I arrived in the United Kingdom, I had no passport. I was helped a lot.” Coming to London from Türkiye more than a decade ago, she didn’t speak English or know anyone else in the country. She still remembers how Yasmin Ismail, founder of the Newham Community Project, would stop by her door to take her two daughters to a scout group run by the project – and bring them back with full bellies.
Today, Yasmin is sorting through food bank donations. A spry sixty year old with a warm smile, she can barely finish a sentence without someone calling on her to solve some last-minute problem. She suggests she might not be the best person to interview anyway – despite the fact that she and her husband manage all nine of the Newham Project’s programs, providing not only food but also a digital hub with internet access, support to young people looking for work, as well as small grants and loans.
“This is my community. I feel a duty to give back, but it also feels good,” Yasmin says dismissively, as if making all this happen was the kind of thing any of us might do in our spare time.
Unpacking boxes of groceries, she explains that partnerships with the local council and small businesses have made it possible to open the food bank three times a week: “We’re quite fortunate that we have a lot of contact with local businesses. And our belief says that everything we do or give is multiplied like 70 times.”
Though most of the Newham Project’s programs are open to people of any or no religion, staff and volunteers share the Islamic faith, and it is largely funded by Muslim organizations, as well as via direct donations from in the form of Zakat, the religious obligation for Muslims to donate 2.5% of their wealth once a year to those in need.
It is Zakat that allows Yasmin and her team to help some 150 Muslim families each year with lump sums to pay rent arrears, put down a deposit, or get creditors off their backs. Applicants fill out a form explaining their financial situation and what they need the funds for, and the project assumes their debt.
But this grassroots project offers more than just material support. For Yeldiz, it provided a diverse community that met her need to integrate socially into a new home. Now, in her role as the Newham Community Project’s assistant manager, she works to extend that sense of belonging to others.
Yeldiz and Yasmin – a retired British-Indian accountant – have quite different backgrounds. What binds them together is shared experience of the Islamic conviction that no one prospers alone. Nor are they alone in being driven by their faith to step into what is becoming an increasingly precarious position for immigrants.
As migration policies tighten, state benefits shrink and the cost of living soars, immigrants can find themselves in a double-bind – scapegoated for putting pressure on public service at the cost of natives’ needs, and at the same time accused of failing to integrate. In this context, religious organisations act as informal banks, aid organizations and networking hubs that can make all the difference to people starting new lives in foreign societies.
An Islamic approach to aid and economics
Helping others and giving back to the community is a fundamental pillar of the Islamic faith. In the Sunan al-Kubra hadith, the prophet Muhammad says that “a person is not a believer who fills his stomach while his neighbour goes hungry.”
This phrase is repeated by Yeldiz and Yasmin and part of their idea of what being a Muslim means. It’s also written on the website of Islamic Relief UK, one the major funders of Newham Community Project and of other initiatives supporting immigrants.
“If we can provide the basics, people can spend a little bit more on paying the bills, preparing for jobs and so on. So that is why we’ve seen the rise of access to food banks and support services,” says Abdulla Almamun, programmes manager at the charity, which receives much of its funding from Zakat.
Globally, Zakat has become so significant a source of funding to projects supporting migrants that the UNHCR has opened a Zakat donation line. Another Islamic principle – that Muslims can not lend or borrow money with interest – complicates access to traditional credit systems, but has also underpinned initiatives offering interest-free loans. The Alternative Financial Support for Students of Faith, for example, organised by the City University of London student union, offers £250 grants to Muslim students who can’t apply for traditional loans.
Networking, connection and careers
Helping those in need isn’t only a central tenet of Islam, of course. And the support offered by religious communities goes beyond charity, encompassing, for example, educational scholarships and access to networks of both social and professional support.
When Divjot Kaur left Delhi to study law in the UK, she wasn’t looking for a faith community to join, so much as the adventure of an exciting new city. But the reality of life in London was tougher than she’d expected. Her parents had spent all their savings on her college fees and relocation, and she feared this may have been a terrible mistake.
“Initially, I felt helpless,” Divjot says. “In the first two months, I was like, okay, maybe I should go back and ask for a refund. I couldn’t connect with my classmates, had applied for several part-time jobs and been rejected by all of them. It felt like I didn’t fit.”
Then, at a campus event, a fellow student invited her to a “prayer and pizza night” organized by the London School of Economics Sikh Society. Divjolt found herself connected to some 220 students who not only shared her religious beliefs, but also experiences of battling through British bureaucratic procedures and struggling to adapt to British life.
"It was not only religion; they connected me to professionals in law and advisors who ultimately helped me find a part-time job. It became important to me because we all come from different countries, but we still share our religion.”
“That’s when I started to have a social life,” she says. “I was invited to different activities that were subsidized by the society. It was not only religion; they connected me to professionals in law and advisors who ultimately helped me find a part-time job. It became important to me because we all come from different countries, but we still share our religion.”
Despite having practiced law for the three years in Delhi before starting her master’s in London, Divjot says she felt like there was an invisible barrier to the UK job market. Joining faith-based professional networks offered a chance to break through that barrier – and help others do the same.
“I would be able to help less experienced students based on my background, but also benefit from the networking opportunities and financial support the organisation offers for attending conferences and covering the required exams for a barrister career,” she explains.
An immigrant church and a divine calling
Portugal, which faces a shortage of skilled professionals in various fields, is more open to employing immigrants than most European countries, particularly if they don’t have a language barrier to break through. But recent legal changes – scrapping a legal route to residency that skipped the visa stage – have made it harder to find a foothold. And stats show that immigrant workers are still far more likely to be in jobs below their level of qualification than Portuguese workers.
Roberta Canella arrived in Portugal with more than a decade of experience as an accountant in the Brazilian healthcare sector, but ended up doing night shifts at factories on the outskirts of the city of Braga. In her spare time, she volunteered at the Pentecostal Lagoinha Church in Braga – 80% of whose members are Brazilian immigrants.
After six years, the church made her a pastor. Roberta now leads a department of the church focused on social, financial and migration aid. Her ministry collects resources from members already established in the country and redistributes them to new families who need help. This year, she says, the church helped almost 200 families in March alone.
“Our church is also an immigrant,” Roberta says, speaking over the phone from Braga. “It came from Brazil and faced some barriers until it was recognized as a church in Portugal last December. It is part of our identity.”
That identity is part of why Lagoinha is both temple and legal office – a place of worship, but also a space for advice on visas and residency statutes, for networking, CV revision, and even a bazaar that has already donated, among other things, five cars to those in need, Roberta says.
“Our church is also an immigrant. It came from Brazil and faced some barriers until it was recognized as a church in Portugal last December. It is part of our identity.”
The intersections of faith and migration are complex. Religious persecution can be the reason some people are forced to migrate. But faith can also be the means to make migrant lives possible. Many are drawn to destinations with existing religious communities they can slot into. And as they settle in and become a part of the greater community of their country they have joined, faith can be central to their identity – a thread that connects life in their adopted home to the home they left behind.
Israel Olofinjana, an honorary research fellow at The Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education, says religion “is so crucial to who we are that it shapes every aspect of our lives.” But migration can also be central to religion. “The Christian faith itself is rooted in migration,” Israel explains. “Joseph was trafficked to Egypt, Abraham was a voluntary migrant, Daniel was in exile – even Jesus was a refugee briefly with his parents in Egypt.”
Israel came to the UK from Nigeria 20 years ago as a reverend and part of the “reverse mission” movement, in which religious institutions send pastors and missionaries from former mission fields – such as Africa and South America – to run and expand churches in Europe, where populations of believers are declining.
Israel says that for him, migration was a matter of “divine purpose.” And though Roberta’s immediate motivation was more prosaic – her husband had lost his job in Brazil – she too sees her position as a calling. Back in Brazil, her pastor had told the congregation that “God wanted to send people from that room to become leaders in foreign countries,” she says. The words used were from the book of Genesis: “leave your country, your relatives, and your father’s house, and go to the land that I will show you.”
“I thought it was targeted to some other members who had already travelled and had better conditions than me. Only when my husband lost his job did I understand that it was the work of God pushing us to go,” Roberta recalls.
Families without borders
“Our God teaches us that we are not better than anyone, that all we have was conceded to us, and helping one another is also helping Allah,” says Hunainah Mansuri, a 24 year-old Cambridge graduate with a degree in psychology who volunteers at the Newham Community Project. It seems fitting then, that the project enriches volunteers as much as those receiving help.
“Everyone in the neighbourhood has a history with aunt Yasmin and Uncle Elyas,” Hunaina says – using these honorifics not in the sense of immediate blood family, but of respected elders who are just as close: “We feel like they are a real family for us. Both have helped everyone here in different stages of our lives. That’s why we are here as volunteers today, we want to help and push others and give back to the community.”
The project also makes public a side of the Muslim community that goes “beyond the dangerous and violent representation of our culture in the Western society,” says Hunainah.
Narratives that cast immigration as a threat to European culture often target religious groups – particularly Muslim ones – as cultivating insular immigrant communities who remain apart from wider society. But immigrant-focused religious groups can create valuable opportunities for cross-cultural connection.
In her award-winning investigation into Zakat in the UK, researcher, podcaster and visual artist Taqwa Sadiq explored how projects that are funded by Zakat but open to everyone can breach the gulf between immigrants and the wider community. “It creates a new culture around money for everyone involved,” she explains – shifting the focus from personal gain to collective responsibility, and framing giving as a source of collective wellbeing, rather than just charity.
Narratives that cast immigration as a threat to European culture often target religious groups – particularly Muslim ones – as cultivating insular immigrant communities who remain apart from wider society. But immigrant-focused religious groups can create valuable opportunities for cross-cultural connection.
Roberta too believes her church has softened prejudice against immigrants. When a neighbor’s bicycle was stolen, a group of residents in her building came banging on Roberta’s door and interrogated her about the bible study group she hosted at home. “One of the young people must have taken it, you Brazilians are like that,” she remembers being told.
When a widowed Portuguese woman called the church after a service last year, Roberta expected some similar complaint: “She asked what would happen in the New Year’s Eve celebration. I could tell by her voice that she was suspicious, so I started explaining that it was to receive people who didn’t have family. And that’s when she opened her heart and said: “Well, I’’m alone, and that’s why I decided to call you.’”
About the author
Thaís Matos is a Brazilian journalist based in Europe. She covers economics, social justice, climate and development, and has received awards for her reporting on financial literacy.
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