When war broke out in Ukraine in February 2022, the number of people forcibly displaced from their home countries around the world was already high. More than 22 million individuals, nearly half under the age of 18, fall under the United Nations’ official mandate as refugees. Though U.S. support for refugees had waned during the Trump administration, a pending policy shift has the potential to increase the number of displaced people who can find a safe haven in U.S. communities.
In a newly published article, associate professor Kathryn Libal and her co-authors, associate professor Scott Harding, and doctoral candidate Madri Hall-Faul, explore the history and impact of different ways to sponsor refugees in the United States. “We assess the re-emergence of community-based approaches to resettle refugees in the United States,” Libal says. Their paper suggests a combination of community and private sponsorship could be transformative for the future of refugee resettlement in the country.
It Takes a Village: Community Sponsorship of Refugees
Historically, the resettlement of refugees in the United States has been managed by individuals and volunteer resettlement agencies, often linked to faith organizations. In 1980, Congress passed the Refugee Act, which formalized the process, establishing a federal program, standards, and funding to support resettlement. It also made health and social welfare programs more readily available to refugees who needed them.
As the number of refugees from different parts of the world continued to grow and shift, U.S. officials proposed different models of sponsoring displaced people, including both community and private sponsorship. Today, the Biden administration seeks to reverse the policies that radically reduced the number of refugees admitted to the United States during the Trump presidency, and has signaled that community and private sponsorship will be critical to strengthening U.S. refugee policy.
To understand the benefits and challenges of one model — community sponsorship – Libal, Harding, Hall-Faul, and other research team members, including associate professor S. Megan Berthold and doctoral students Grace Felten and Lukas Champagne, have been conducting interviews with resettlement advocates and volunteers since 2017. They also examined the important role of organizations such as Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS), a Connecticut-based group that provides comprehensive services and support to refugees, in establishing community sponsorship as a viable model.
In 2015, a wave of displaced Syrians fleeing the country’s civil war prompted IRIS to collaborate with faith-based groups that wanted to lend their support. “There was a groundswell of support across the country to help Syrian refugees, and a lot of community members came forward to support their local resettlement agencies,” Libal explains.
There was a groundswell of support across the country to help Syrian refugees, and a lot of community members came forward to support their local resettlement agencies. — Associate Professor Kathryn Libal
To co-sponsor refugees with IRIS, these groups needed to assist resettling families in Connecticut for one year and help refugees find housing, employment, schools, and other services. This form of community co-sponsorship has proved effective, Harding says, because community groups connect refugees who don’t already have family in the United States to community members who help refugees integrate in communities and form social ties to help them find work and become self-sufficient.
In 2019, community sponsorship got a boost when a group of philanthropies formed the Catalyst Fund to support the model across the United States. To date, some 34 local organizations and five resettlement agencies have received Catalyst Fund grants. These co-sponsorship groups are established in cities as far-flung as Seattle, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles,…
Read More: School of Social Work Researchers Explore New Model to Sponsor Refugees