For more than four decades, community sponsorship has seen refugees successfully settled in hundreds of regional communities in Canada beyond the reach of metropolitan settlement service providers. In 2022 the Australian Department of Home Affairs, inspired by the Canadian experience, launched the Community Refugee Integration and Settlement Pilot (CRISP) in partnership with Community Refugee Sponsorship Australia (CRSA), a national charity working to expand and improve refugee resettlement in Australia by harnessing the generosity, goodwill and social capital of everyday Australians. Since its launch, the CRISP has seen dozens of refugee households settle in regional Australia, in places not previously designated by the federal government as primary settlement regions. As a result, the CRISP is providing a modest-scale experiment in deconcentration of refugee settlement beyond metropolitan areas using a grassroots community-led approach. In practice, refugee newcomers are experiencing the positive impact of being warmly embraced by engaged community members, while also navigating new challenges and ways to approach integration and belonging, sometimes without day-to-day access to large diaspora networks. Engaged communities are taking local steps to address the global refugee crisis and experiencing the many collateral benefits of this approach.
Download: Pioneering New Regions Through Community Sponsorship of Refugees.pdf (16.6MB)
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