State Department Introduces New Direct Refugee Resettlement Program
In the meantime consider forming a co-sponsor team with your local refugee resettlement affilliate
This week we learned groups of Americans will be able to directly sponsor refugees for resettlement in the United States. The current refugee resettlement model is a public-private partnership with the U.S. working first with the U.N. to take referrals, and then one of nine refugee resettlement agencies in the U.S. receiving the refugee cases for resettlement with local affiliates.
I happen to be the founder and chairman of the board of one such refugee resettlement center, Canopy NWA. We work with our national partner, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, to resettle refugees to Arkansas.
Integral to our success in welcoming newcomers is the continued engagement of our local community in being part of the welcoming process through cosponsorship. Such cosponsorship helps us build strong networks with our community, and there is a mutually positive experience for the newly arriving family and the volunteers.
Before developing Canopy NWA in Arkansas, I had the chance to help develop a new resettlement site in Madison, Wisconsin as an extension of the resettlement happening in Milwaukee. There too crucial to our success in developing a satellite location for resettlement was the vitality and interest of cosponsor teams.
This new program the U.S. State Department is introducing appears to be experimenting with a new format where individual small groups will have the opportunity to apply to be essentially “micro” resettlement centers.
Cosponsorship is definitely a commitment. Typically a cosponsor team is preparing a home for a newly arriving family, fully stocking it with everything needed upon arrival (furniture, supplies, food stuffs etc.). Cosponsors then also serve as cultural ombudsman, often helping new refugees acclimate to the local context.
It appears the biggest difference between the way Canopy NWA and other resettlement agencies do resettlement, and this new model, will be the absence of the direct social service resources resettlement agencies provide. It will be interesting to see how the state department extends resources to these Welcome Corps and the newly arriving refugees for the core services typically staffed by refugee resettlement agencies.
I’m definitely in favor of the U.S. experimenting with methods for helping even more refugees arrive in the United States. I guess I also am hoping the state departments listens to and learns from existing refugee resettlement agencies with robust cosponsorship programs, so that we do the “long welcome” of refugees well.
To learn more about Canopy NWA and perhaps register for an upcoming cosponsorship training (yes, we always need more cosponsor teams), visit: