Welcome to the City of Sanctuary website. If you're a complete newcomer to our website and would like to get more involved in it, this page will show you quickly around and help you feel more at home.

City of Sanctuary is a "grass-roots led" organisation. We're made up of ordinary people with an interest in promoting a stronger sense of welcome in our cities towards refugees and asylum-seekers. Our website is run by a growing number of local groups, spread across the UK. It has been built to help us publish our stories, co-ordinate our activities and discuss issues with others.

Our website enables us to:

• publish news stories,
• publish information pages,
• write blogs,
• invite comments from the wider public, and
• discuss issues and co-ordinate activity within private forums.

Comments

Many stories and articles on our site are open for comment, and anyone can comment on them. If you have registered for a user account on the website, your comments will appear straight away. If you haven't got a user account here, or you haven't logged in, your comments will be moderated; which means they won't show up on the site until they have been checked and approved.

If an article is open for comment, you can leave one simply by clicking the "Add new comment" link underneath the article.

Groups

To get more involved in the website, you need to join a group. Each city involved in City of Sanctuary has its own group and, in future, some city groups may divide into more specific teams to deal with their publicity, events, and so on.

You can find a directory of all groups here. You can also click the 'Groups' link in your personal menu - on the left hand side under your name.

Forums

Each group is allocated its own private Forum. This is a simple discussion forum (sometimes called a "message board") where members of the group can discuss issues with each other. At the moment, there are no discussion forums open to the public, although this might change as more people get involved.

You can explore and take part in the forums open to you by clicking the "Forums" link in your personal menu - on the left hand side under your name.

Newsletters

Some groups publish email newsletters through our website. Anybody can sign up to receive these direct to their email address - even people who do not have a user account here. In addition, the newsletters remain available on our website.