We’re looking to understand more about the impact of Community Sponsorship on the sponsors themselves. What do you learn by becoming a sponsor? What do you gain?
We hear lots of sponsors talk about how doing Community Sponsorship has changed them, but we don’t often get the specifics. We’ve designed this survey for sponsors to take when they reach the end of the Sponsor Agreement (one year after welcoming a refugee family) to get a better insight.
We hope that this will be a tool for us to improve the scheme and to demonstrate its worth for communities as well as for refugees.
We’re collecting results on a rolling basis. If you reached the end of the Sponsor Agreement after the end of May 2020 and haven’t filled out a survey, please email us letting us know which Community Sponsorship Group you’re from and we’ll send you a link to complete the survey. All responses are anonymous.
Check out some results from the first round of analysis below.
Initial results show that only 22% of sponsors gave less than 1 hour per week to Community Sponsorship on average, while 44% gave 5-7 hours per week. This is a significant commitment, highlighting that sponsors tend to go above and beyond to support the families they welcome.
The 4 personal gains that sponsors reported feeling most strongly were ‘Satisfaction’, ‘Fulfilment’, ‘Sense of community’ and ‘Pride’. 100% of respondents reported an increase in Satisfaction, Fulfilment and Sense of Community, while 89% reported an increase in Pride. On a scale of 0-5, where 0 = no gain and 5 = lots of gain, more than three quarters of respondents rated the increase in Satisfaction and Fulfilment that they had gained from sponsoring refugees as 4-5, while more than two thirds rated the increase in Sense of Community that they had experienced as being 4-5.
The four areas which sponsors reported having learnt most about were: ‘a culture other than your own’; ‘the challenges faced by people with low levels of English in the UK’; ‘life on a low income in your area’; and ‘local statutory and voluntary services in your local area’. Across all 4 of these areas, 100% of respondents reported an increase in their knowledge. More than half of respondents rated their increase in knowledge about a culture other than their own as a 4 or 5, where 0 = no learning and 5 = lots of learning.