We host a variety of workshops to help families with various issues. One workshop is about extremism and violence and how to prevent young Somali children from being influenced by extremist persons, and as such allow the parents to exchange their experiences and concerns over the issue. Another workshop is about sexually transmitted diseases, where you can receive information about STDs such as HIV and AIDS among others, to improve your knowledge of STDs and what measures you can take to help prevent them. We also offer support in other areas, including domestic violence, family planning, first aid, and home safety.

In cases that involve social services, we can act as mediators between the family and social services to help improve support.

In order to create a better understanding of the community, SDS has designed a Somali Cultural Awareness programme. The programme is of great interest to people who need to strengthen their knowledge and understanding of people from the Somali community. It assists in also identifying how best to approach, and engage with, the community in order to address their specific development needs, as they will have practical examples of different social issues. This training has been designed to further enhance the skills of professionals, practitioners, and other service providers with little or no experience of working with Somali families and children.

SDS has engaged in various projects that support youth in the community, whether it’s through education and integration or raise awareness about youth crime and violence. We have helped young people reintegrate into education, especially those struggling with language learning. In past projects, we have assigned them specific teachers who specialize in teaching English to newcomers in the community. As time went on these students’ language skills improved. We have also hosted events around youth concerns, as well as provide advice, guidance, and information services every day at our drop-in centre.

Somali Development Services provides an interpreting and translation service that enables organisations to communicate more effectively with people of different nationalities. These services may be used to correspond with health services, police constabularies, Leicester City Council, and other statutory and voluntary organisations. We also help with translating documents, proofreading, emergency face-to-face, or over-the-phone interpreting. Languages include Dutch, Arabic, Italian, Somali, Swahili, Gujarati, Urdu and Bengali.

To book an interpreter or to receive more information about this service please contact us on (0116) 2855888 or through our website.

SDS provides high-quality services focussing on individual wellbeing, as well as physical and mental health. Rooted firmly in the local community, we work in partnership with other health and social care organisations to provide services that are truly reflecting the needs of the people we support from awareness-raising seminars, and workshops to individually support mechanisms with their individual health or social care needs.

We work with the local community to raise awareness on issues related to dementia and mental health. We provide support to families and individuals affected by this issue through 1-to-1 sessions with our advisors and experts.