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Community Sponsorship is a programme for welcoming and supporting vulnerable refugees resettled to the UK, and we’re hugely proud to be part of the UK’s strong resettlement sector. Nevertheless, we think there’s huge potential to draw on Community Sponsorship to create new forms of community-led welcome for different cohorts of newcomers. And over the past 18 months we’ve been exploring what might be possible.
Interviewees were universally interested in the ways in which community-led support could be adapted for newcomers beyond the current Community Sponsorship cohort of resettled refugees. They identified potential challenges, such as whether the locations of community-led support would match up with the locations of demand, and whether community groups would be able to draw in the skills needed to support unaccompanied young people.
However, none of the interviewees wanted to walk away from these challenges. Their overriding message was their enthusiasm to help people who had been displaced to to move their lives forward, however they had made their way to the UK.
Buoyed by the enthusiasm of these people involved in Community Sponsorship, we’re excited to be developing a pilot in partnership with Talent Beyond Boundaries (TBB) to test community-led welcome of displaced talent candidates arriving to work in the UK.
The pilot, called Neighbours for Newcomers, will bring together TBB’s work to grow displaced talent mobility pathways with Reset’s knowledge of community welcome of newcomers.
It will see us design and test a model of community-led welcome of families where one family member identified through TBB’s Talent Catalogue has secured a job and a Tier-2 (General) visa to work in the UK.
“Community sponsorship is transformative. It provides refugee families with a support network to help them adapt, learn and become independent more quickly. But it also has a real effect on local volunteers, binding them together in a common cause and allowing them – in a small way – to be part of the global solution to forced displacement.”
We aim to use the pilot to develop a sustainable model whereby community groups will be trained, supported and approved by Reset and funded by the corporate employer.
In partnership with two fantastic organisations, Social Finance and Home for Good, we’ve also been exploring how to draw more community members into the support of unaccompanied young people arriving in the UK.
Pre-pandemic, Home for Good launched the Families of Refuge project, working to open up new supported-lodging placements for resettled young people. In the meantime, Social Finance scoped and designed a model of community-led supported-lodging hubs for welcoming unaccompanied minors.
According to this model, each hub would involve volunteers setting up and running a local supported-lodging scheme for young people. As part of this, they would recruit local carers and engage the community to provide wraparound support to both young people and carers.
In each case, the Local Authority would act as the corporate parent to unaccompanied minors, and each hub would be supported by a central organisation, like Reset, providing training and support.
We think there’s real potential here but there are also lots of questions still to answer: do community groups have appetite for the level of risk and responsibility involved? Would Local Authorities feel comfortable contracting with a community-led hub? What would the financial flow look like and could it be made efficient?
Sadly, the pandemic put the brakes on this work for a couple of reasons. First, the pause in resettlement flights means that Families of Refuge is not currently able to recruit supported-lodging hosts. Second, Local Authorities are at such stretch that it’s not the right time for Social Finance to test and further develop their model. As a result, we made the difficult decision to bring the project to a close in October this year. We’d like to acknowledge here the generosity of US philanthropists Ed Shapiro and Barrie Landry who made this work possible.
In spite of this set back, the pandemic certainly hasn’t dampened our commitment to exploring ways to extend community-led welcome to more newcomers.
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Come together locally to welcome a refugee family. Find out how Community Sponsorship helps refugee families in need build a new life in the UK with confidence and dignity.
There are so many ways to show your support. Find out more about how to get involved.
How do I sponsor a refugee family? How does the process work? Reset is here to support you every step of the way.
Wherever you are on the fulfilling and thrilling journey through Community Sponsorship, we have training courses, videos, articles and more, all designed to help your group and the family you support.
From drop-in sessions to UK-wide networking events, we bring together people and professionals involved in all stages of the Community Sponsorship journey.
Our toolkits are designed to make it easy for you to support community-led welcome, including resources for local groups, support for potential lead sponsors, and practical advice for Local Authorities.
Research, monitoring and evaluation are essential for making evidence-based decisions that help community-led welcome to flourish.
Make an extraordinary difference to the lives of people who have lost everything by signing up to our (free) Landlords for Refugees register.
Not everyone can donate their time, so if you are choosing to donate money today instead or as well as, thank you. Your generosity is vital to the work we do support community-led welcome of refugees.
We empower volunteers to welcome refugees into communities across the UK, and we’re inviting you to be part of our movement. Together, let’s shape a better future.
Help others by sharing your account. Why were you attracted to community-led welcome? What worked, what did you learn, what has the experience been like for you?
Community-led welcome isn’t about one organisation. We work with a range of organisations and individuals to deliver our work and to grow the movement.
