The group was founded by Ricky Lowes, an English woman married to a Kurdish man. Ricky was then an English teacher working at the University of North East London and Walthamstow College. She had a wide group of friends and when her son Dana was born in December 2000 she joined the local National Childbirth Trust.
She had already been struck by the numbers of mixed language families that she knew or had come across, how little most of them knew or were able to find out about raising children bilingually and how little support was available from people like health visitors and so on. The NCT offers a service whereby they put groups of women who have just had babies in touch so that they can meet up and give each other mutual support. Out of 6 families in the group that Ricky joined, 4 were mixed language families (3 of these families are still WFBG members).
Ricky decided that something needed to be done. Firstly in around 2001, she wrote an article for the NCT magazine on bilingualism and quite a lot of people got in touch. An email group emerged; members of this group started to email each other to ask questions or to tell others about things that they had found out or useful resources. Some time later in early 2003 Ricky invited everyone round to her house to meet up for coffee and as many as 25 people squeezed into Ricky’s front room.
It became clear that we couldn't carry on meeting in people’s houses as there just wasn't room. Ricky got some very useful advice from Voluntary Action Waltham Forest about establishing a group which had a constitution and which could therefore raise small amounts of money and hire a room to meet in. Waltham Forest Bilingual Group was then formally created in a room in Waltham Forest College one evening in May 2003.
In June 2003 we held our first drop in event at the then Toy Library at Comely Bank in Walthamstow village. We successfully applied for a small Lottery (Awards for All) grant and began to organise speakers and more regular drop in events. We overcame the hurdles of losing the Toy Library venue eventually when The Limes Community and Childrens’ Centre opened in the summer of 2004. We also got over losing our founding chair when Ricky moved to Sweden for a year’s sabbatical (mainly to provide a more Kurdish language environment for her son – this sounds mad but was true and in mid 2004 Iraqi Kurdistan was, as you will appreciate, not an option). Didier Cordina took over as Chair and has led the group forwards ever since. By May 2005 we had recruited over 50 families as members, we had just reported on our first Awards for All Lottery grant and were making plans to raise some more funds for future work.
Claire Thomas and Karin Laumann – June 2005
