Community Sponsorship of Refugees and Asylum Seekers

Social work education for practice with refugees remains underdeveloped, and refugee resettlement organizations in the United States are understaffed. A promising new approach engages community sponsors to resettle refugees, providing opportunities for civic engagement and wider understanding of refugee policy. We provide a research-based assessment of the community sponsorship model based on semi-structured interviews with 56 community sponsor volunteers, resettlement organization staff, and health providers in several states in the United States. Participants were recruited using key informants, direct outreach, and snowball sampling. We used a modified Sort and Sift, Think and Shift methodology. The paper underscores how community sponsors are “doing social work” through their voluntarism and the challenges they have faced. These include struggles in accessing transportation and affordable housing, obtaining employment, and navigating educational, social service, and health care systems. We argue that social workers and social work educators are well-positioned to build skills and preparedness among community sponsor groups and train professional staff to better meet the needs and challenges facing newcomers. They are also equipped to help volunteers confront culturally insensitive tropes and stereotypes, provide trauma-informed training, and foster volunteers’ advocacy for social welfare policy reform that is inclusive of newcomer populations. These benefits of the program are even more evident in a context of anti-immigrant and refugee policy-making during the second Trump administration and may provide important bridging for refugees and other newcomers when resettlement organizations are forced to limit operations or shut down.