Welcoming the Stranger: The Canadian Church and the Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program

McKinlay, Christine

doi:10.32920/ryerson.14647872

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 13 publications

(47 reference statements)

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“…However, religious institutions may also have very strong religious norms that conflict with the increasingly secular norms of mainstream society, and may also struggle to remain relevant in Canada's increasingly multicultural and pluralistic society (Bramadat, 2014; English et al, 2014; Hiemstra, 2002; Mulholland, 2017). Also, many religious institutions have declining membership, so refugee programmes may be unsustainable in the long term (Bramadat, 2014; McKinlay, 2008). Another issue is that in Canada, both GARs and PSRs assist refugees with health, education, employment, language, housing, and social services, but GARs have stronger links to settlement agencies while PSRs are more closely linked to community networks (Drolet & Moorthi, 2018).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Refugees and religious institutions in a mid‐size Canadian city

Derksen

Teixeira

2023

Population Space and Place

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Canada is a leading refugee-settlement nation with a highly developed private refugee sponsorship programme involving many community and religious institutions. This study explored how religious institutions affect refugee settlement in Kelowna, a mid-size city in British Columbia. Kelowna has had a significant increase in refugee sponsorship since the 2015 Syrian crisis, and most private sponsorship has involved churches and the local mosque, in collaboration with governmentfunded settlement services and community partners. We collected data through a questionnaire distributed among former refugees and semi-structured interviews with key informants including clergy, refugee-sponsorship groups, and service providers. The results reveal that religious institutions help refugees cope with barriers and challenges in Kelowna in three main ways: bridging language barriers between newcomers, service providers, and sponsorship providers; helping newcomers establish new lives in Kelowna and move toward integration; and helping newcomers move away from precarity toward prosperity as they re-establish themselves and their families.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Refugees and religious institutions in a mid‐size Canadian city

Derksen

Teixeira

2023

Population Space and Place

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“…These societal changes are troubling factors with respect to refugee sponsorship and other settlement programs. The structure of current refugee programs assumes that faith communities will be major players and motivates them to continue filling a significant role (Chapman 2014;McKinlay 2008;Quan 2015). If fewer Canadians relate to faith communities, and volunteerism in general is declining as volunteers age, then refugee advocates must focus explicitly on identifying and amplifying the conditions that enable volunteers to support refuge-seekers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Actions

Morris¹,

Juma²,

Terretta³

et al. 2022

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A book of this type relies on the willingness of people to tell their stories, and we are grateful especially to the members of St. Joseph's Refugee Outreach Committee (ROC) for their openness in doing so. We are even more grateful for the opportunity to learn about, and share with our readers, the tremendous good they have done over many years.This book would also never have been written without the meticulous records and notes kept over thirty years by dedicated members of St. Joseph's ROC. In particular, we are inspired by Louise Lalonde's foresight in maintaining a tradition of record-keeping. We will never think of meeting minutes as trivial again. Without them, meaningful details of the ROC's efforts and refuge-seekers' stories would have been lost.To our interviewees: the time we spent learning from you was precious and we are so grateful that you welcomed us into your confidence. We hope that you will love this book. Many more volumes could have been written about St. Joe's Committee members and the lives of the newcomers they served.To our reviewers: thank you for sharing your time during a global pandemic and finding the bandwidth to provide kind and constructive feedback.We would also like to thank Evan Murtadha for her work on the beautiful cover image for this book; Madeleine Berry for formatting the manuscript to prepare it for publication; the friendly and encouraging staff at University of Ottawa Press for supporting the publication of this book; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for funding this project.The events in this book and our research work took place primarily in Ottawa, which is the unceded and traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe. We respect and honour their rights as traditional guardians of this beautiful land. Section 115(I)(k.I) of the Immigration Act 1978 states that the Governor in Council can make any regulations "where a person or organization seeks to facilitate the admission or arrival in Canada of a Convention refugee … establishing the requirements to be met by any such person or organization including the provision of an undertaking to assist any such Convention refugee, person or immigrant in becoming successfully established in Canada…." 1 * * * At the time of writing, in 2021, if we had asked Canadians what they know about Canada's support for refuge-seekers, they would probably recall the harrowing image of three-year-old Syrian Alan Kurdi's body lying lifeless on a Turkish shore on September 2, 2015.

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Welcoming the Stranger: The Canadian Church and the Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program

Cited by 2 publications

References 13 publications

Refugees and religious institutions in a mid‐size Canadian city

Refugees and religious institutions in a mid‐size Canadian city

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Actions

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