It takes a village

Through the contact form on our blog, we recently received an email with the following question: “How do you organize yourselves so that the complex work of settlement and support can happen for multiple families without burning out your team of volunteers?”

It's an important question, and not an easy one to answer. Each of the three families that we have sponsored so far arrived after the first year of settlement of the previous family was over, so that made things easier. But having enough volunteers to carry out all the tasks needed is no easy feat, especially for the latest arrival, a single mum with four children, who needs a lot more support than the previous families.

Being a group made up entirely of volunteers can be a challenge. It means that people are not always available, and not always reliable. Everyone has busy lives outside the Ripple group – work and family obligations, holiday trips and so on. A number of people who joined the group four years ago have since dropped out, while others who are nominally members only sporadically chip in. Community sponsorship groups such as ours are vulnerable to this kind of fluctuation and unpredictability – unlike churches, for example, which can pull in volunteers from a wider congregation.

Newcomer and group members' kids mingle at an Easter party

We have learned a number of lessons of how to make it work, despite all the challenges.

• For the latest settlement, we actively recruited new volunteers who have daytime availability (since many of the ‘old’ members have full-time jobs). All of them are absolutely amazing, always ready to step in when help is needed. We even found a wonderful volunteer ESL teacher who is teaching the mum at home, since she cannot attend formal classes due to a lack of access to childcare.
• Being a volunteer in our group is ideal for people who want to be flexible and who have only a limited amount of time. Except for the English lessons, the need for support varies from week to week and people can volunteer whenever it fits into their schedule. 
• Several of our new volunteers live close to the family’s home, which makes volunteering easier, especially if support is needed at short notice. 
• Online tools are our friend when it comes to organizing ourselves – especially a shared google calendar and a messenger group where we post updates and ask for support, as well as google docs to share information. 
• We have had the same chair and several key members since the beginning, which allows for continuity. 
• Regular meetings with all volunteers, as well as regular message exchanges, help keep up a sense of community and being 'on the same page'.
• Last but not least: We all agree that supporting this beautiful famil is extremely rewarding! We genuinely enjoy hanging out with them and probably get as much out of the experience as the family does. 

                                                                                                                         By Claudia Blume

Please help us bring an Eritrean family of five to Canada

We need your help! The Ripple Refugee group is sponsoring a young mother and her four children, all under 8 years old. The family was forced to flee their home in Eritrea and is currently residing under precarious circumstances in neighboring Sudan. Eritrea is recognized as having one of the most repressive regimes in the world. 

The UNHCR and the Canadian Government have reviewed and approved the family’s application for refugee status and they could arrive in Toronto before this coming Christmas. Our group has chosen to support this young mum and her small children because they are very vulnerable and because we think we can make a huge impact on their lives.

But we need to raise $25,000 to make this happen. Any donations over and above this amount will be used for refugee sponsorships our group will undertake in 2019.

Tax-receipted donations can be made on-line via the Rosedale United Church’s (our sponsorship agreement holder) donation page at Canada Helps (please click here). Please be sure to indicate in the box marked “Include a message for this charity” that the donation is for: RUC-25 Ripple Refugee Project.

Eritreans seeking safe passage to Sudan (credit: UNHCR)

Because of the generous support of our donors we have been able to sponsor and settle two Syrian families and one individual over the last three years, totalling twelve people. You can read about their incredible stories and the journey that our group of concerned citizens from Toronto has been on in our blog.

For more information about donating to our group, please click here. 

Arrivals

I travel a lot for work. When the flight home is over, and after the final exhaustion of body and soul by customs lines and luggage carousels, I used to race through the automatic doors to the international arrivals hall and grab a cab or Uber for the last twenty-one kilometres of the trip.

But for the past two years, though still always heart-hungry to get home quickly and see my family, I now stop and look around when I’m through those doors and free to leave.

I look for signs. Literally. “Welcome xxx Family to Canada!” they say, and, usually "مرحبا بكم في كندا." Sometimes "bienvenue au Canada”. If you know the acronyms and lingo, no small talk with the signs’ bearers is needed. GAR, JAS, or BVOR*? Have you already spoken with the family? How large is it? What country are they from? Do they speak English? How do they feel about coming to Canada? Do you know any of what they’ve been through? Best wishes for you all.

On June 6, I was there, in the international arrivals hall, with a sign. For the third time. I’d joined my friend Sawsan Awad and her family to greet her brother, Mahmoud, the latest human being sponsored by  Ripple and it was at this exact spot in Terminal 1, in December 2015, where we had first met Sawsan, her husband Mohamad, and the rest of the Abdallah family in person.

Family reunification is important for the wellbeing of newcomers, and was something that Sawsan had said she wanted and needed - to restore links with some of her family after being separated by war. And so we did not hesitate to sponsor her youngest brother, who was still stuck in Lebanon.

It can take four hours for newcomers to walk through those automatic doors, but I always want to be there, just on the other side, even before the plane lands and for the whole time it takes them to get processed. With my sign, red and white carnations, and Canadian flag. I will not miss the moment the arrivals doors open and they come through, a moment that represents joy, journey, meaning, grace, relief, grief, sadness, happiness, weariness, survival, openness, philanthropy, resistance, resilience, family, citizenry, past, present, and future. I’m unapologetic about this. Such human moments generate more humanity. It’s a ripple effect.

Two months of settling into his new life in Toronto, Mahmoud told me, “Arriving in Canada is one of the best things that ever happened to me. Because I speak English, I’ve faced nothing like the challenges faced by many newcomers. But settling in a new community takes effort. I’m working hard and trying to get involved in the community. I still miss my family and friends back in Syria and Lebanon. l had no choice but to leave. After so many years, I finally reunited with my sister and her family. She has three beautiful daughters, and the two older ones, Aya and Reemas, are very happy and excited to have another uncle around. My sister Sawsan was overwhelmed with joy, and burst into tears when she was at the airport to pick me up.”

In a couple of weeks I’ll be returning from another business trip and walking through that spot where we first met Sawsan and her family, then Amr, Rasha, and baby Kareem, the second Syrian family our group had sponsored, and now, Mahmoud. And I’ll look for more signs, think with gratitude of those who’ve arrived, and the many more we must bring through those automatic doors at arrivals.

*Government Assisted Refugees, Joint Assistance Sponsorship, Blended Visa Office-Referred

By Rebecca Davies

Why we decided to focus more on BVOR refugees rather than named-case sponsorship

For Private Sponsorship groups like ours, which want to undertake sponsorships on an on-going basis, there are number of benefits of working through the Blended Visa Office Referral (BVOR) program as compared to the Named-Case stream.

Named-Cases are those where an application is prepared here in Canada and submitted to the Canadian Immigration Department (IRCC) for review and, hopefully, approval. The vast majority of Syrian refugees who were privately sponsored over the last two years came to Canada through the Named-Case program. Their applications were prepared by family or community members or by groups such as Lifeline Syria before being submitted to the IRCC for consideration. 

The BVOR program, on the other hand, contains refugees whose files have already been reviewed and approved by the IRCC.  A list containing brief biographical profiles of the approved BVOR refugees is periodically circulated by the RefugeeSponsorship and Training Program and Group of 5 or private sponsorships groups, working with their Sponsorship Agreement Holders, can choose from this list who they want to sponsor.  

When comparing the two refugee programs, Private Sponsorship groups may find that there are a number of benefits of opting to sponsor refugees from the BVOR stream. These benefits include:

• Lower fundraising requirements:  Under the BVOR program the government pays up to 40% of the associated costs for the first year of resettlement here in Canada. Named-Cases require private sponsors to pay for 100% of the settlement costs.

• Faster and more predictable arrival times:  Since refugees under the BVOR stream are pre-approved by the government and are ‘ready to travel’, they will normally arrive within 12 weeks of the private group requesting the sponsorship [Note – there was a breakdown in the BVOR program in 2016/2017 which led to inordinate delays, substitutions and outright cancellations but this was an exception to the program’s normal operating process]. 

Named-Cases typically take a minimum of 18 months but possibly as long as 36 - 48 months from submission of the application to their arrival into Canada, assuming the application is approved.  

• Reduced Paperwork: Private groups need to fill in minimal paperwork to sponsor BVOR refugees whereas Named-Cases involve extensive paperwork and backup documentation to support the application. 

•  BVOR cases are pre-approved and arms-length, eliminating the possibility of emotional turmoil that can arise in stalled or rejected Named-Case applications: With Named-Cases, delays or rejections can be heart-wrenching for both the sponsors and the refugees themselves. In some cases, the sponsors are communicating directly with the Named-Case applicants trying to explain why the application is delayed or possibly helping out financially until it is approved. [Note – the process errors in some of the BVOR files mentioned above, in 2016/2017, in some cases also lead to similar issues, but that is not how the program normally functions].

• Sponsor groups can choose who to sponsor based on their own priorities: Our group is interested in sponsoring the most vulnerable of refugees – those with medical issues, women at risk, larger families, single parent families etc.   In addition to these criteria, we are now also interested in sponsoring Rohingya refugees. The circulated BVOR lists provide profile descriptions, including country of origin, which allow groups to select who they want to sponsor based on their own pre-determined priorities

• BVOR sponsorships do not use up scarce Sponsorship Agreement Holder (SAH) quotas: Each year the IRCC sets a limited quota for the number of sponsorships that a particular SAH, such as the United Church, can undertake.   Since BVOR sponsorships do not count against these scarce quotas they are more appealing to SAH’s and they can be initiated even when the SAH has reached its annual quota limit.

I want to emphasize that both the Named-Case and the BVOR programs are important and valuable in terms of Canada’s overall refugee efforts and the humanitarian values that they espouse.  The Named-Case stream enables community groups, or the newcomers themselves, to sponsor relatives or other key members of the newcomers’ original community, and this has been shown to be extremely important to the emotional well-being of the newcomers and in helping to ensure their successful long-term resettlement here in Canada.  From a purely humanitarian point of view, family reunification is obviously something we should strive for, rather than having families separated by geography and possibly leaving close family members overseas, still in harms way.   

Furthermore, in what has become known as the “Echo” effect, many Private Groups developed a strong attachment with their sponsored newcomers and are now undertaking follow-on Named-Case applications to help these newcomers bring in extended family members as well.  Our group have decided that we will consider sponsoring adult children or the parents and grandparents of people we have sponsored but generally we are not looking at sponsoring relatives beyond that – but that is a decision that our group, like other groups, must make on a case by case basis.

Notwithstanding the “Echo” effect, for those groups that are considering sponsoring refugees on an on-going basis, one after another, they may find for the reasons mentioned above that the BVOR program is much easier to work with than the Named-Case stream.  Currently there is a shortage of Private sponsors putting their hand up for BVOR refugees which is a shame given the many benefits associated with this program.

Andrew FitzGerald

Chair, Ripple Refugee Project

This article was first published on the Canada4Refugees blog