Since 1979, World Renew’s Refugee Program has walked alongside many Canadian churches and community members as they have sponsored and resettled thousands of refugees to Canada. Refugee sponsorship is a significant undertaking and it requires support from many people and resources – it is a true community effort! Through this effort, many of the churches that have sponsored refugees with World Renew have also established relationships with government-funded settlement organizations.
Beginning in May of 2016, World Renew has had the privilege of taking part in a two-year research project that is exploring these types of relationships. The project, “Faith and Settlement Partnerships: Setting Immigrants and Canada Up for Success,” is led by the Centre for Community Based Research in Waterloo, Ontario in collaboration with thirteen community partners including universities, local immigration partnerships, social service agencies, and faith groups. The goal of the project is to explore ways in which faith-based organizations — such as churches — and settlement agencies are collaborating well, and areas in which collaboration might be improved.
The project used three different research methods:
- A survey of 73 faith leaders, practitioners and stakeholders in southern Ontario and a focus group with three local immigration representatives.
- A national literature review featuring an annotated bibliography of 52 sources.
- Six local case studies conducted by community partners in different parts of southern Ontario investigating faith and settlement partnerships in their contexts. World Renew and partners was one of the six case studies.
This research project demonstrates the very meaningful role that faith-based groups and their communities play in welcoming and resettling newcomers in Canada. As stated in the report, “Private refugee sponsors constitute a significant Canadian contribution to the refugee settlement landscape of the world. Perhaps no other program empowers communities to facilitate integration the way in which the PSRP [private sponsorship of refugees program] achieves this.”
Participation in this project has given World Renew an opportunity to reflect upon the tremendous work that many Canadian churches and their communities do to create safe and welcoming new homes for refugees fleeing war, persecution, and traumatic experiences. It also gave the refugee sponsorship champions of some of World Renew’s longtime sponsoring churches an opportunity to describe and celebrate how their refugee settlement efforts have benefited from connections to local settlement agencies and a chance to reflect on how, in some cases, these connections could be strengthened.
World Renew’s Refugee Program hopes that this research project, and others like it, can help shed light on the ways that various community stakeholders, whether they be places of worship, government-funded social services or independent non-profits, can all play a role in making Canada a more welcoming society.
For more information about the research project, including the literature review, World Renew’s case study report, and an executive summary please click here.