Fundraising: How our group did it

Wanting to help refugee families start new lives in Canada - under Canada's Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program - first means fundraising. 

Of course, fundraising is only one part of the resettlement process; there are already good resources to help groups learn how to do the many other things that need to be done, such find and furnish accommodations, navigate the healthcare and education systems, even how to make an airport welcome sign.

We’ve not, however, seen a single resource on how to fundraise. But this blog post is also not a “how to fundraise for your refugee family” either. It’s something between “how we made fundraising happen” and “how fundraising happened to us.” It’s a case study: a case in how our group - one of hundreds of private sponsorship groups - has raised over $50,000 so far to resettle a family of eight.  Because we're not done. Human need is human need, and there's still a lot more out there unfortunately. So while we've raised enough for one family (from Syria) and are awaiting their imminent arrival, we continue to fundraise because we intend to sponsor and settle additional families. Our overall goal is to raise as much as possible. More money = more refugee families safe in Canada. 

A lot of other groups have asked us how we've done it so far, and we find the same situation over and again: people who are fearless about assuming responsibility for a refugee family from somewhere they may not have heard of before recently, who will find and furnish shelter for them, and, for the next year, commit to supporting the family each step of the way as they integrate into life in Canada. All this the sponsor groups seem to take in stride.

But what scares them? The FUNDRAISING.

And so here's the fundraising part of The Ripple Refugee Project story to now. Some of this may read as superb luck meeting opportunity. It was. But there's an equal amount of opportunity meeting preparedness. If you’re also part of a group trying to fundraise for a refugee family, know that you have just as much luck, opportunity, and preparedness waiting for you as we did. It’s all a ripple effect when you want something so much for other people.

Here’s how we raised the money:

1. We gelled as a team. We didn’t all know each other four months ago, and together had taken on a big mandate. Our motivation is part of our shared common humanity, but still: the work must get done. We’ve also signed a Memorandum of Understanding amongst ourselves.

It’s taken us two or three months to really get humming, because we made sure to put in strong administrative processes before diving into the fundraising. Form, norm, storm.

We’ve a strong leader/chairperson in our group’s founder, and also made sure we had a firm understanding of our own roles. We’re know that fundraising is social, and that fundraising culture starts within - all our meetings start with a potluck dinner, which we linger over. Because it’s over these dinners that the culture of our group formed and is still forming, based on the different backgrounds, attitudes, and expectations each member brings. Because people are different, groups are all different. We continue to monitor our group dynamic and tweak our approach and philosophy as we deepen our relationships and understand each other more.

2. We set our financial goal. In educating ourselves on our sponsorship options as private citizens, we learned there were two streams we could consider:

1. Named Case: where private citizens identify and put forth name(s) of people who should be considered refugees to bring to Canada. In this stream, it takes at least 12 months for the government to review the file, and the process could take years before resettlement is a reality. And the full cost of sponsorship is shouldered by the private citizens.

1. BVOR (“Blended Visa Office-Referred” program): a three-way partnership among the UNHCR, Government of Canada, and private sponsorship groups. In this scenario, people's cases have already been reviewed and deemed eligible for refugee status in Canada. The advantage of this stream is the timeline is short: the file of the refugee has already been approved, and in many cases they’re ready to travel. Best of all, the government will pay around 40% of the cost of resettling.

Originally, we were targeting a family of four, which costs $27,000. As the government would be kicking in $10,000, we needed $17,000 in an account. As we have a large group (17 members) we felt that everyone’s portion was doable (though we didn’t then and have never monitored each group members’ fundraising progress; in notionally dividing the goal by the number of group members, we felt success was doable). $17,000 was our original fundraising goal to sponsor a family of four (though the situation changed for us).  

3. We created a Bridge Fund. This was money that was on loan by us, Ripple Refugee Project members. Before we could even put our hand up to apply to sponsor a family, we had to have the money in our account. At the same time, we decided we didn’t want to start soliciting with a general pitch. We felt as a group that our fundraising would be most effective if we had a profile of “our” family and their story. It was a conundrum: we couldn’t get a profile until we had raised a lot of money, and yet we didn’t want to fundraise until we had the family's profile. So we put the money in ourselves on loan to trigger getting matched with a specific family whose story we could tell. As donations come in, members are reimbursed or decide to just leave their loans as additional gifts. 

4. We created a web presence through our blog and Facebook page. These establish our legitimacy, we think, and also give us a place to solicit online donations, and update donors on our progress. They also give the outside world a way to contact us.

5. We ensured financial accountability and donor stewardship. We developed financial controls and wrote a financial policy, which is public. We’re always updating our donor FAQ (“how will you disburse money to the family?” or “what happens if you raise more money than your stated goal?”). And we’ve started sending email updates to our donor list as we get meaningful information to report.

6. The Syrian crisis and Ripple Refugee Group got strong media attention.

September 2, 2015: four years into the crisis, little Aylan Kurdi’s picture became a symbol of the unacceptable human suffering of the Syrian civil war. Finally, the world was paying attention.

September 5, 2015: Luck is what happens when preparedness meets opportunity. Ripple member Dr. Raghu Venugopal’s appearance on CBC's The Current was pivotal in getting us matched with a family by Lifeline Syria (the executive director was listening to the interview), and kick-started our fundraising.

7. We got adopted. After seeing the picture of lifeless Aylan on the Turkish beach, Dr. Jennifer Bryan, emergency physician at University Health Network, sent out an email to a group of 70 doctors, suggesting that they together should help with this humanitarian crisis. On the distribution list was Raghu Venugopal, just fresh from his national media appearance on Ripple's behalf. At that point, we’d been matched with our family, and Raghu was able to tell his colleague, Jennifer, this news and suggested the UHN group of doctors work through The Ripple Refugee Project.

Now, the family we’d just been matched with was a special case: three generations comprising of eight family members, one of whom has mobility issues. Our fundraising goal had just necessarily more than doubled, but the UHN doctors agreed it made sense to partner with a larger family and one with medical needs. As individuals, the doctors pledged a total amount together of $44,000 (THANK YOU AGAIN AND MERCI, UHN DOCTORS!).

Traditionally, refugee sponsorship has been done predominantly by the church/synagogue/mosque model. In this age, it makes sense that a congregation of doctors also fulfils this role.

8. We got the ability to give our donors tax receipts. One of our members, a public nurse, is also a Ryerson graduate and we were accepted as part of the Ryerson University Lifeline Syria Challenge campaign. After the media interest, this was the other huge breakthrough to help our fundraising: our donors were able to receive tax receipts, and we could take advantage of Ryerson’s online donation page and gift processing. Thank you Ryerson!

9. We solicited donations. We finally had momentum and gift processing capability. Through letters, email, face-to-face meetings and by social media, we talked about our project all the time, and asked for donations. Through Ryerson, we get a weekly confidential update on new donors to our fund (without showing the individual amounts).

10. We’re always motivated by the ripple effect. You just never know what can happen. The friend of one of our members saw the solicitation request on Facebook, and forwarded it to a friend. Who sent it to another friend. Who showed it to a client. This client came forward and pledged up to $1 million to resettle 20 families (note: this philanthropist will not be working through our group. There's no way we can manage more than one family at a time).

The concentric circles of our ripple effect also manifest in the hours we spend speaking at rotary clubs and with other private sponsorship groups just starting out. We aim to work in the open, and have a public Google drive with all the documents we've created that others may find useful. 

And we hope that if you’re in such a group, that you find our fundraising story inspiring. And if you’re not, that you consider forming your own group to resettle one family of the four million refugees who've had to flee their home country, or making a donation.

By Rebecca Davies (this post was also published on the 101Fundraising blog)

Our application has been approved!

Great news! We learned from our partners at Ryerson's Lifeline Syria Challenge today that our application to sponsor the Syrian family  we have been matched with has been approved by Citizenship and Immigration Canada. 

The file has been transferred to the Canadian Embassy in Beirut, where the visa officers will now continue to process the refugee applicants' part of the application.

The clock is ticking ... if all goes well, the family could be in Toronto in a few weeks already!

We have been matched with a Syrian refugee family!

After a bit of a slow period waiting to be accepted by a sponsorship agreement holder (and most of us being away in August) things have suddenly moved very fast. After Raghu’s interview with the CBC’s The Current, our group was approached by Lifeline Syria, an organization that aims to resettle at least 1,000 Syrian refugees in the Greater Toronto area over the next two years. They asked if we were interested in sponsoring a Syrian refugee family of eight – grandparents, three adult sons (one of them with a mobility issue), a daughter-in-law and two young grandchildren. The family has been approved by the UNHCR and the Canadian government, and is ready to travel.

While sponsoring a family of eight was more than what we had anticipated, the group members’ positive response to the matching request was swift and unanimous. Although we had been open to sponsoring any refugees who need help, many of us have been particularly moved by the plight of Syrian refugees.

Our sponsorship agreement holder is Christie Refugee Welcome Center, but our biggest direct partner in the sponsorship process will be the Lifeline Syria Challenge team at Ryerson University.

Several of us had great meetings with both organizations yesterday, discussing the process and next steps. We received a lot of new, interesting information - we did not know, for example, that refugees receive their flight tickets to Canada as a loan that they need to pay back. 

We were delighted to hear from Samantha and Emma at Lifeline Syria Challenge that many Ryerson students have volunteered to help groups such as ours with research work and practical help. Most importantly, many of the student volunteers are Arabic-speakers (some are even from Syria), a skill that will be desperately needed as none of us speaks the language. They can even provide us with a cultural orientation before the family arrives.

Meeting at Lifeline Syria Challenge, Ryerson University

Once the paperwork has been finalized, the family could arrive any time between one and three months and there is still a lot that needs to be done!

For starters, we need to raise $50,000 to cover half of the family’s living expenses in the first year. The rest will be covered by the Canadian government.

We are very fortunate that a group of Raghu and Wendy's emergency doctor colleagues have already offered to provide financial support. The group is lead by physicians at the University Health Network, with support from doctors at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and St. Michael's Hospital. To date, the emergency physician's group has pledged $ 40,000, bringing the Ripple Refugee group well within reach of our fundraising target for the first family we sponsor. 
We are excited that Jennifer from the University Health Network joined our group last week and that Rebecca, a fundraising guru with tons of experience, became a member this week.

Please help us reach $ 50,000 by donating here.

On the drop-down menu ‘Select a designation for your gift’, select:

Andrew FitzGerald “Ripple Refugee Project”.

The donations with be handled by Ryerson University and you will be issued a charitable tax receipt. Our group will be sponsoring additional refugee families in the future, so any donations above the $50,000 target will be used for those subsequent settlements. 

If you want to help through in-kind-donations (especially furniture) please send us a message through this blog site. 

"The roadblock is the Canadian government"

The shocking photo of 3-year old Syrian Aylan Kurdi, found lifeless on a Turkish beach a few days ago, appears to have generated more empathy for the plight of refugees, and more media interest, than any other report about migrants in previous months. Canadians are increasingly holding their government accountable for not bringing in more refugees, especially Syrian refugees, and for letting Europe deal with the growing migrant crisis on its own. The government is far from reaching its already modest goal of bringing in 10,000 Syrians over 3 years, with only about 700 arriving in Canada last year. The CBC's The Current talked to our group member Raghu about some of the frustrations sponsorship groups such as ours are facing. Following the great, in-depth interview, Raghu was bombarded with other media requests. Hopefully the attention the migrant issue is finally getting will push the Canadian government to bring in more Syrian and other refugees as soon as possible, and to make it easier for people like us to sponsor them.

Listen to Raghu's interview: http://bit.ly/1L7nEz4

 

Who should we sponsor?

We started of our second meeting with a pot-luck dinner at Pegi and Phil’s house.
Rebecca, a registered nurse with extensive mental health experience, joined us to become our newest member. There are now 14 people in the sponsorship group – plus 15-year old Kieran, who has decided to accompany his uncle Raghu to the meetings. Will this large size make things unwieldy and complicated? Some group members suggested splitting the group in two, each with their own sponsorship agreement. After some discussions we agreed to stay together, as it would put less pressure on us inexperienced ‘first time sponsors’ and allow for more flexibility, as many of us have a busy schedule and are often traveling. We all agreed that given our large size, we need functioning sub-committees with clear expectations.

Several of us volunteered to be the lead for the various tasks required by the sponsorship agreement, such as housing, employment and health. 

One of the most important questions we asked ourselves was: Who should we sponsor? A woman at risk, someone from the LGBT community, a family? Some thought that sponsoring a bigger group of people might be too ambitious financially. We would need to raise at least $17,000 for a group of four – probably a lot more given how expensive Toronto is. Others felt strongly about sponsoring a mother,or parents, with children and felt that our group is big and connected enough to raise sufficient funds. Some members pointed out the potential difficulty of settling in teenagers into Canadian society. 

Given the strong medical expertise in our group, with two physicians and two registered nurses, and the availability of excellent medical and mental health resources in Toronto, we agreed that we should be open to sponsoring refugees with medical conditions. Several of us have been especially moved by the plight of Syrian refugees. We recognized that our choices are dependent on the profiles we will receive from Citizen and Immigration Canada, via the sponsorship agreement holder. Once we choose a profile we can put a place holder for three days to make further inquiries.

Our next important step will be to find a sponsor agreement holder (SAH). We discussed which one would be the most suitable for us. Andrew will first contact the United Church to see if a congregation is willing to support us. This lead to an interesting discussion of why SAHs seem to be mostly faith-based. None of us has any affiliation to a church or other religious group. Why are there not more secular groups involved in sponsoring refugees?
By Claudia Blume

We are a group now

We had hoped to find at least 5 people needed to create a constituency group that can sponsor a refugee under the blended VOR program. The response was bigger than we had hoped: 13 people (and two guests) showed up at our first ‘formal’ meeting. Most came from two different groups – association members of Doctors Without Borders (where Claudia works) and members of a film group to which Andrew and Claudia belong.  It turns out that many of us live in Riverdale and that the group members have a wide range of expertise that will be valuable for settling in refugees, including backgrounds in medicine, education, human resources, finance and communications.

We shared our motivations for joining the group. Some of us simply wanted to give back while others have been particularly alarmed by the plight of Syrian refugees and wanted to do something instead of just feeling helpless in the face of the enormity of the problem  - and being frustrated by how few refugees from Syria and other countries Canada is taking in. Once a leader, Canada is now a shadow of its former self when it comes to taking in refugees. 

Canada aims to to resettle about 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next three years - less than 0.02 per cent of the number of Syrian refugees hosted by Jordan, and not even 0.009 per cent of the total taken in by Lebanon. Ottawa expects private groups to should the majority of the burden. Several of us are appalled that the Canadian government makes private citizens pay a big part of the costs for settling in refugees and hope to raise awareness about this issue.

We invited Paul M. to our first meeting, whose faith-based group had sponsored two sets of refugees, a family from Iraq and a couple from Burma. The group’s experience was mixed: one settlement was very positive and easy while the other one was very challenging, mainly due to different expectations of the group and the refugees, who had not been informed prior to their arrival that Canadian sponsors would be responsible for their settlement in the first year. They were angry that they could not live with family members in a different town but in the end valued their experience in Toronto as they were able to adapt much quicker to their host culture and learn English faster.

Paul gave us some valuable pieces of advice, such as that we should be careful with our expectations. Our role is to help settle refugees and not become friends for life. We need to be aware that we will be quite busy before the refugees arrive and in the first 2 months after their arrival, with activities such as finding housing, opening bank accounts, finding schools etc. He stressed the importance of group formation and developing conflict resolution mechanisms.

Claudia Blume