There is little longitudinal research that directly compares the effectiveness of Canada’s Government-Assisted Refugee (GAR) and Privately Sponsored Refugee (PSR) Programs that takes into account possible socio-demographic differences between them. This article reports findings from 1,921 newly arrived adult Syrian refugees in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. GARs and PSRs differed widely on several demographic characteristics, including length of time displaced. Furthermore, PSRs sponsored by Groups of 5 resembled GARs more than other PSR sponsorship types on many of these characteristics. PSRs also had broader social networks than GARs. Sociodemographic differences and city of residence influenced integration outcomes, emphasizing the importance of considering differences between refugee groups when comparing the impact of these programs.

Despite the media attention to Syrian refugee families being welcomed, finding work, and feeling at home in small towns across Canada, little is known about resettlement and integration in smaller and rural communities. Addressing this knowledge gap, this study visited four rural communities across four provinces in an effort to highlight the experiences of smaller and rural communities and the refugees living there. Based on interviews and conversations with rural refugee sponsors and community members, Syrian refugees, and service providers, the findings tell a story of refugees being welcomed into rural and smaller communities and of communities coming together to support the newcomers and find solutions to rural challenges. The article concludes that rural places can have a lot to offer refugees, some of whom settle permanently in these areas, and their experiences should be included as part of the larger narrative of refugee resettlement in Canada.

Drawing on interviews with 204 participants in two studies of privately sponsored refugee resettlement in Ontario, Canada, we explore the resettlement effects of pre-arrival contact on the interactional dynamics between private sponsors and privately sponsored Syrian refugees. Those who had regular pre-arrival contact via digital applications such as Facebook, Skype, and Whatsapp reported more positive, “successful” resettlement experiences than those who had not. This pre-arrival interactive dynamic has theoretical/conceptual implications beyond an understanding of the benefits of “information exchange.” Pre-arrival sponsor-sponsored interaction is not bound by the contexts of displacement or resettlement, but constitutes a “third space” of reception, co-created through trusted contact. We develop the concept of “resettlement knowledge assets” and report on how these assets emerge through pre-arrival trust building, modify the resettlement expectations of both sponsors and sponsored, and reduce resettlement uncertainty.

This article provides the first history and critique of Australia’s private refugee sponsorship program, the Community Support Program (CSP). As more countries turn to community sponsorship of refugees as a means to fill the “resettlement gap,” Australia’s model provides a cautionary tale. The CSP, introduced in 2017, does not expand Australia’s overall resettlement commitment but instead takes places from within the existing humanitarian resettlement program. The Australian program charges sponsors exorbitant application fees, while simultaneously prioritizing refugees who are “job ready,” with English-language skills and ability to integrate quickly, undermining the principle of resettling the most vulnerable. As such, we argue that the CSP hijacks places from within Australia’s humanitarian program and represents a market-driven outsourcing and privatization of Australia’s refugee resettlement priorities and commitments.

World University Service of Canada (WUSC) participates in private sponsorship as a sponsorship agreement holder through its Student Refugee Program. More than ninety campus-based constituent groups known as WUSC Local Committees resettle approximately 130 refugee students to Canadian post-secondary institutions each year. This article seeks to assess the effectiveness of the Student Refugee Program’s youth-to-youth sponsorship model in integrating former refugees into their receiving communities. We outline the impact of the Student Refugee Program upon its beneficiaries, the important role youth volunteers play in supporting their integration and building more welcoming communities for newcomers in Canada, and the effect of the program on receiving societies. We conclude with recommendations for scaling up the program in Canada and sharing the model internationally.

Through a qualitative case study with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) sponsorship groups and former refugee newcomers, we adopt a reflexive, relational, and systemic lens (Bourdieu) to analyze the institutional and interpersonal relationships in the Private Sponsorship of Refugees (PSR) Program, and more specifically, the ways in which MCC Ontario’s sponsorship program invigorates or frustrates dynamics of social inclusion. We situate the institutional relations of the PSR Program as nested social fields and sub-fields, revealing complementary and competing systems of capital that direct explicit and implicit visions for “success” in MCC sponsorships. A peculiar Mennonite/MCC social field and structure of capital generates institutional and social tensions, yet an ambivalent disposition or divided habitus presents possibilities for seeing, understanding, and challenging dynamics of social exclusion.

There are many different ways in which one might describe the goal of Canada’s Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program. For sponsors, though, one goal is clear: to get “their” refugees ready to handle the rigors of “month 13.” The supposed ideal is that, by month 13, newcomers are employed and living independently in Canada, as productive members of society. The reality is messier. The objective in this article is to offer an account of how sponsors think of their job, in relation to month 13. Using data collected via interviews with nearly sixty private sponsors in Ottawa, it is shown that sponsors are motivated by securing stability for newcomers by the time month 13 arrives, but that sponsors differently flesh out the meaning of the stability they are seeking to achieve on behalf of newcomers. In particular, the data suggest, sponsors believe that newcomers’ attitude to integration is especially strongly related to their actual integration, and newcomers do especially well by month 13 to the extent that sponsors are able to build and support a positive attitude towards it.