Community Sponsorship of Refugees and COVID-19’s Challenges

COVID-19 has severely impacted all aspects of the global refugee protection system. Border closures, dramatically reduced air travel, constrained humanitarian aid, and direct risks from the virus itself are among the many factors exacerbating hardships faced by refugees and asylum seekers.1 As we emerge from this period of profound closure, the reopening of our refugee protection systems will be intimately linked to the pandemic’s ongoing impacts on our economies, politics, and societies. We write as colleagues at the University of Ottawa Refugee Hub who work on the Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative (GRSI), a partnership between our university and the Government of Canada, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Open Society Foundations, the Shapiro Foundation, and the Giustra Foundation.2 The GRSI encourages and supports the establishment and growth of community sponsorship programmes around the world. In April and May 2020, we convened a series of conversations with government policy officials, leaders of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), philanthropists, and sponsorship groups from more than 20 countries.3 Through these conversations, we sought both to understand COVID-19’s immediate impact on the sponsorship community, and to gather collective wisdom about the future. This article reflects our learnings and reflections. Community sponsorship empowers groups of citizens to take the lead in welcoming and integrating refugees who have arrived in their communities via facilitated third-country protection pathways.4 Sponsors agree to meet a range of newcomer needs that typically include housing, language training, and cultural support, as well as friendship and introductions to the local neighbourhood. Canada operates the longest-running and most well-known community sponsorship programme in the world,5 but since 2016 unique variants have emerged (or are being designed) in 15 other countries. Some of these programmes connect sponsors to refugees referred by UNHCR through traditional resettlement processes, while others are linked to ‘complementary pathways’ that rely on alternative avenues to protection. In all its variants, sponsorship builds intimate forms of community connection that have positive impacts for refugees and welcoming communities alike.6 Sponsorship also builds important social capital – among sponsors, between sponsors and newcomers, and within communities – and creates ‘trusted messengers’ who can share positive stories about newcomers within their own peer groups.7 More than two million Canadians have sponsored refugees since 2015,8 and in the days before COVID, tens of thousands of new sponsors around the world were preparing to welcome refugees as new neighbours. The GRSI supports governments and civil society champions designing and implementing sponsorship programmes, and is part of a vibrant ecosystem of local, regional, national, and global actors working to introduce and scale community sponsorship around the world. The COVID-19 pandemic forced this group of stakeholders to confront a series of new challenges, including: COVID-19 exacerbated significant hardships for refugees and considerable challenges for refugee protection.10 Lengthy impositions of travel restrictions and physical distancing requirements resulted in delays in interviews, health screenings, and other vetting and preparatory procedures that underlie third-country solutions. Prolonged, system-wide shutdowns ultimately led to an increase in more structural backlogs for all refugees, including those destined to be sponsored. Refugees whose travel was suddenly suspended, as well as those who recently arrived in new countries, faced all kinds of novel and unexpected challenges.11 It was critical that these new circumstances be recognized and mitigated. The sudden health and economic crisis also forced sponsors waiting for newcomers to confront an array of difficulties (and sometimes financial liabilities), while those sponsors who were supporting recent arrivals needed to seek new ways to provide settlement assistance and to respond to unique pandemic-related vulnerabilities.12 For countries with fragile resettlement infrastructure, the changed environment caused by COVID-19 threatened the erosion of financial capacity or political will to prioritize refugee resettlement or explore community sponsorship programmes. Community organizations, especially those whose funding model is dependent on refugee arrivals, also faced significant short- and medium-term risks. More broadly, COVID-19 fuelled public anxiety about border management, general distrust of migration, and xenophobia. These kinds of shifts threatened the ability of certain countries to resume refugee arrivals and/or to recruit sponsors, even as the pandemic itself began to feel more managed. Despite these challenges, stakeholders felt that community sponsorship had the potential to play an important role in rebuilding our global refugee protection system following the pandemic. At its core, sponsorship relies on community compassion, problem solving, and creativity – features that give these programmes the inherent potential to build on the local solidarity that has emerged in response to COVID-19, while simultaneously countering negative and xenophobic attitudes and bolstering localized support for immigrants. Community sponsorship is also a flexible tool capable of supporting refugees referred by UNHCR on the basis of vulnerability criteria, as well as refugee students, workers, and family members arriving through other pathways. This versatility – coupled with its proven ability to offer wrap-around support and successful integration in a cost-efficient way – was recognized as useful for governments exploring innovative humanitarian programmes and mutually beneficial protection pathways in the wake of the pandemic. Finally, it is significant that sponsorship can facilitate refugee arrivals in a way that may accord with new public health requirements. This is because sponsors can ensure newcomers are provided with homes where they can physically distance, while still benefiting from personalized and warm community support. These features were noted as potentially relevant to support early programme resumption. As the realities of COVID-19 began to take hold, our conversations with the global refugee sponsorship community illuminated not only challenges, but also the need for immediate work in three core areas: In the early days of the pandemic, there was a strong sense that existing protection infrastructure needed to be preserved and sponsors and newcomers with urgent needs had to be supported. This included supporting sponsors and refugees impacted by suspended travel, facilitating pre-departure communication between approved sponsors and matched newcomers, helping sponsors and newly arrived newcomers to build supportive relationships while physically distancing, and creating peer support opportunities for sharing best practices during this unprecedented period. The nascent ecosystem supporting sponsorship programmes also needed protection itself: government officials writing policy or implementing programmes needed the mandate to continue this work, sponsorship-oriented NGOs needed their funding to be preserved and, in some cases, enhanced, to meet unexpected circumstances, and allow for the development of new online resources, and sponsors at all stages of their journey needed support and encouragement to continue their engagement. It was also necessary to anticipate the eventual resumption of international travel and to prepare to meet this resumption with sufficient sponsor capacity. Ideas in this area included helping existing sponsors advance on their journey, mobilizing and recruiting future sponsors, supporting the design and development of new programmes, strengthening the evidence base for sponsorship, and fortifying and diversifying existing policy designs. Governments and community leaders also needed to find ways to advance in this fragile new environment, and all work geared towards expanding sponsorship programmes or preparing for new sponsorships needed to be undertaken with sensitivity towards communities suffering from health, economic, or other concerns. Finally, there was recognition of the need to use the time of closure to innovate and begin adapting many aspects of the refugee protection system to a world transformed by the pandemic. Innovations and efficiencies in all parts of the sponsorship journey could be explored, including targeted technological initiatives, better leveraging of collective resources, and mobilizing the creative and effective use of private and public impact investments. Much has happened since the global sponsorship community gathered in the early days of the pandemic. As feared, the toll of COVID-19 closures on the overall resettlement system has been significant. In January 2021, UNHCR reported that, despite unprecedented need, an all-time low of 22,770 refugees were resettled in 2020.13 It has been a dark time for those needing international protection. There were nonetheless many glimmers of hope for the future of community sponsorship. During the first year of COVID-19, new sponsorship programmes launched and landed refugees in Belgium and Valencia, Spain.14 The United States announced an ambitious and innovative resettlement programme that includes community sponsorship as a central pillar.15 Community sponsorship organizations around the world found ways to retain funding and remain operational, and policy officials continued to design new programmes. New ideas for scaling sponsorship were explored, including in the United Kingdom, where a £1 million sponsorship backstop fund was announced.16 Sponsorship groups continued to form, using time at home to plan and submit applications. And where they were able, sponsors wore masks to airports to quietly welcome newcomers, finding many unique and heart-warming ways to offer friendship and support to their new neighbours.17 Ordinary people doing extraordinary things have been central to the story of the pandemic. Community sponsorship is a tool that will allow us to benefit from this goodness as we aim to reopen and rebuild refugee protection systems in a world transformed by COVID-19. Original Kaldor Centre blog post 25 May 2020; updated 15 March 2021

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