Comfort came to the UK as a student from Nigeria thinking she was entering a marriage and finishing her schooling — but the schooling never materialised and it soon became clear the marriage was a sham and that she had been a victim of trafficking.
Aged 29 and entirely on her own in a new country, Comfort endured terrible abuse, suffered a breakdown in her mental health and tried to take her own life. She ended up in hospital two years later, in 2017, where a concerned nurse offered support in the form of a referral to a charity and Comfort took her first step in her journey towards safety.
“Interacting with normal people at that time was very difficult for me,” said Comfort. “I was a broken person, my mental state was zero, I had given up on myself.”
It is hard to reconcile that shattered young woman of 2017 with the confident, self-assured, smiling Comfort of today. Since then, she has gone on to recover her sense of self, secured refugee status in the UK, held down several responsible jobs and become a trustee of two charities. She has also met the King twice, including at an exclusive charity event at Buckingham Palace.
There have been several reasons for this extraordinary transformation in Comfort, but primary among them is an unlikely object — the humble bicycle. Her love affair with the bicycle began when she contacted a charity that refurbishes second-hand bikes donated by the public and which they give out free to refugees.
This remarkable charity, The Bike Project, founded in 2013, is one of the organisations being funded by our A Place to Call Home winter appeal in partnership with Comic Relief, which seeks to help London’s two most disadvantaged groups, refugees and people experiencing homelessness.
Earlier this month, London Mayor Sadiq Khan followed in the footsteps of the King when he met Comfort, having come down to The Bike Project to hear from their beneficiaries and add his backing to our campaign. On a tour of their workshop in Deptford, south London, the Mayor was shown around by CEO Lizzie Kenyon, who told him about the 2,000 bikes they give out annually and the 110 women refugees a year who are taught to ride on their Pedal Power programme.
Comfort, now 38 and a trustee and volunteer for The Bike Project, told The London Standard how getting a bike and learning to ride had given her “so much more than a bike”.
She said: “I was living in a hostel for asylum seekers and the food they gave us was frankly terrible, so to get a proper meal at The Bike Project when I came here was a big deal. The charity also gave us £5 to cover our £4.50 travel, which meant I could use the buses to explore London for the day and still have 50p left over.
“I had no money so to me £5 was a fortune. I would save the 50p and every three weeks I would buy myself chicken and chips. You have no idea how much that meant to me.”
Over time, Comfort added, as she learned to ride and grew more confident, the bike became her “liberator”. “The bike gave me a freedom to travel anywhere I wanted and allowed me to integrate into society. I made friends and formed a supportive community with other women in the group. It lifted me out of my depressive state and revived my hope. I became a functional person again.”
The Mayor, moved by the testimonies he was hearing from beneficiaries past and present, tried one of the refurbished bikes for himself and said: “It’s fantastic to see the life-changing work that The Bike Project is doing.
“These refurbished bikes open up London and provide the asylum seekers who receive them with community and independence. London is the greatest city in the world and the key reason for that is the diversity of Londoners.
“Our city has a proud history of providing sanctuary to those seeking refuge and I am committed to supporting refugees who have come here to rebuild their lives and to do what I can to help them thrive in their local community. I encourage Londoners to dig deep and give what they can to support the A Place to Call Home appeal.”
His visit came as the total raised by our winter appeal passed the £3 million mark, thanks mainly to an additional £755,000 from This Day Foundation. It takes the total amount donated by them to our campaign to £1,215,000, of which £675,000 will be granted through our appeal partner Comic Relief.
Other major donors to our joint appeal with Comic Relief include £500,000 from The Julia Rausing Trust, £500,000 from Sainsbury’s, £500,000 from Comic Relief, £100,000 from Barratt Foundation and £70,000 from the Evening Standard Dispossessed Fund.
But we would have still been around £115,000 shy of the £3 million total if not for the general public who have donated more than £127,000. All told, over 2,200 people have given with a top individual donation of £10,000 and an average of around £57.
Samir Patel, chief executive of Comic Relief, paid tribute to the generosity of all donors and the general public when he too visited The Bike Project, accompanied by Gary Lubner, founder of This Day Foundation, the largest donor to our joint appeal. Like the Mayor, they toured the workshop and met Comfort, as well as Robi, a refugee from Pakistan and another former beneficiary turned volunteer.
“This place has become like family to me,” said Robi. “They taught me how to ride, they gave me my confidence. I built relationships with other women in the programme and I found companionship. It was fun and so exciting to learn a new skill, so much so that for a moment you forget your problems and that you were an asylum seeker.”
Reflecting on his visit, Lubner said: “This is a genuinely brilliant concept that takes bikes from people who don’t need them and gives them to people who do. Many asylum seekers live in hotel rooms and they have no money to get around, so a bike can transform their life.”
The philanthropist, who made his fortune through leading Belron, a global vehicle glass repair and replacement company, launched This Day Foundation just three years ago and decided to focus his UK philanthropy on refugees.
He has done so for two reasons, he said. “All of my grandparents were refugees who fled pogroms in eastern Europe and I often used to think, if they had arrived here as refugees today, what future would they have? It hits me hard because everything I and my family have achieved would not have happened without them being welcomed in and finding a safe place to call home.”
He added: “What strikes me is that the system is fundamentally unfair. I have met hundreds of refugees and I am yet to meet someone who would not have preferred to remain in their country of origin if war or persecution had not forced them to move. They arrive here and have to face a ‘hostile environment’ policy introduced by the previous Tory government, despite having a valid claim and having endured such hardship. As a philanthropist, my question is, how can we alleviate this? The new government is making a good start but far more needs to be done. That is why I am supporting this joint campaign of The London Standard and Comic Relief. The fact that they are prepared to get involved in this tricky, unsexy subject and enter new territory — I really admire it.”
Another beneficiary of The Bike Project, Amina (not her real name), 28, also spoke to The London Standard, describing how she grew up in Somalia as one of 18 siblings. Amina was academically bright and won a scholarship to the US to finish her education where she got an economics degree, but when her time ran out in the US, her identification as part of the LGBTQIA+ community meant it would be too dangerous to return to Somalia and so, aged 26, she sought asylum in the UK.
“I was hospitalised in the US with mental health problems and the medical bills left me destitute,” Amina said. “I had a visa to come to the UK, so I did, and after about a year I was granted refugee status. My life here was hard. I was living in a tiny box of a hotel room eating microwaved meals. I would sit in the darkened lobby of the hotel — they kept the lights off to save electricity — trying to call non-profit organisations to help me. I was struggling to find purpose in life and feel like I belong.”
For Amina, getting out and about was key to her mental health, but the cost of a bus was unaffordable on her Home Office allowance. She Googled “bikes” and that was when she discovered The Bike Project. There was a three-month waiting list for a bike but after that, in August last year, she started lessons with Pedal Power.
“As a girl growing up in Somalia, I wasn’t allowed to play sports or learn how to ride like my brothers, so it felt like a big thing to be learning how to ride,” she said. “We had lessons every Friday and I started to meet a community of women, some of whom became my closest friends.”
Recently, Amina completed a charity ride from London to Brighton where she raised £300 for The Bike Project and also started paid work at a community centre as a project worker. “Now I bike all over London,” she said. “This little charity has changed my life.”
Since 2013, The Bike Project has donated more than 14,000 bikes and taught 768 refugee women to cycle, saving £13.7 million in transport costs. “Like so much else we are funding, this is a genuinely transformative project,” said Samir Patel. “I am thrilled that with the help of the public, we will be supporting them as part of our appeal this winter.”
How you can help
£10 could provide a young person travel to meet a wellbeing mentor and have a hot meal
£50 could provide travel to work or school for a month for an at-risk youth
£150 could refurbish a bike for an adult refugee giving them freedom to travel independently
£500 could train ten people with experience of homelessness to become homeless health advocates
£1,000 could enable one of our partners to fully support a young person throughout the year
To make a donation, just scan the QR code or visit: comicrelief.com/winter
