You are safe here: Community Sponsorship policy and refugee integration in ‎the UK

Globally, resettlement is considered one of the most durable solutions for refugees. The UK ‎has introduced a Community Sponsorship Scheme that enables communities to resettle ‎refugee families providing them with enhanced integration support aided by volunteers. ‎This paper investigates the nature of integration support that sponsored refugees receive ‎utilising the analytical framework of UK’s Indicators of Integration (IoI). Data was collected ‎from interviews with refugee adults resettled in diverse and less diverse areas. ‎Our findings ‎illustrate the importance of support given by volunteer groups to enable access to resources ‎and connections‎. We establish that there is much potential for sponsorship ‎programmes to ‎add value to refugee support suggesting that the current expansion of sponsorship from its ‎Canadian roots may help facilitate refugee integration. However further research is needed ‎to uncover the long-term experiences of sponsored refugees and to compare their ‎outcomes to those of forced migrants arriving via different mechanisms.‎