🌍 "Longfellow Welcomers" sponsor three refugee families through federal program
It's a daunting commitment to take part in the Welcome Corps program, but that didn't stop 27 neighbors on short notice.
Last month, Eva Zewdie posted a time-sensitive offer to the Longfellow Social Facebook group:
I'm looking for 6-8 neighbors to form a group with me IN THE NEXT WEEK to sponsor a refugee family.
A sponsorship application submitted by the end of next week is the best chance at a family being authorized to travel before the inauguration. See comments for why timing is critical.
The photo is some of my group members and the family we welcomed July 19th: A mom and her kids (ages 13, 11 and 6).
It's a daunting responsibility to help a family navigate every part of American life. They are amazing people though, and helping them get here and find their way may be one of the most impactful things I'll do in my lifetime.
She knew it was a long shot. In the comments section she detailed the level of commitment required to take part in the Welcome Corps, a federal program that connects refugee families to groups of citizens willing to sponsor them and help them get established in their new country. Basically, the request was asking strangers to commit to months of regular meetings, online classes, chores, paperwork, and fundraising, in partnership with people they'd probably never met, for the benefit of a family they knew nothing about, and with just a few days to consider. She hoped she could maybe find a half-dozen people daring enough to take her up on it.
But by the end of the day, the challenge was no longer finding enough people to fill a group. It was figuring out what to do with the amount of interest that came flooding in.
Background
Eva, who lives near Longfellow Park, has a longtime personal and professional interest in refugee causes. So she was familiar with the Welcome Corps when the U.S. Department of State launched it last year as an attempt to fix a bottleneck in the system: There are more refugees vetted and authorized to come to the United States than there are agency staff to help them resettle.
Welcome Corps opens the job to ordinary citizens. That helps clear the queue of qualified families waiting to immigrate, and has the added bonus of providing more hands-on support and local knowledge than a nonprofit case manager who's assigned to dozens of families may be able to. But it's no small commitment: Groups commit to being the family's chief navigators, funders, and point of contact for their first three months on U.S. soil. They must:
- Fundraise to fully support the family for their first 90 days, about $2,500 per family member
- Find them housing and help furnish the place with basic necessities
- Secure them insurance, food, and cash benefits
- Help them land a job
- Pick them up from the airport, ferry them around, and help them learn the public transit system
- Mentor them on the basic norms for navigating daily life that natives often take for granted
This summer Eva participated in the program with a group of colleagues, who were matched with an East African family of four. Following a basic playbook from the Welcome Corps, they started laying the foundations of a new life. They secured a grant from AirBNB for a free monthlong stay, and when it was time to move out of the short-term rental, found a St. Paul homeowner willing to offer six months of free rent in her duplex. They helped the family's single parent craft a cover letter and résumé and eventually land a full-time job. They got the kids enrolled in school and soccer. They drove the family around, rode the bus with them, made visits at all hours of the day, and chipped in their own money and goods. It was a lot.
And yet, when the 90 days were up, Eva wanted to do it again. It was one of those rare opportunities to put effort toward something with an immediate visible impact, for people identified at an international scale as among the world's most vulnerable.
It was also a lot of fun to be part of a team of like-minded people, and to get to know a family that had lived a life more extraordinary than just about anyone you can encounter in daily life. Plus, it was a chance to be a tour guide of your own city and culture, a new lens to see the uniqueness in the places and customs that become invisible through repetition.
As she said in the original post, it was meaningful enough that she was eager to sponsor another family while the program still existed. And this time around, she wanted to do it with neighbors.
"Longfellow Welcomers"
After dozens of people responded to her post, Eva, an introvert who is not at all the gung-ho group-leading type, ended up hosting three Q&A sessions at her house in the ensuing days. When the dust settled, 27 people had opted in.
They elected to split into three groups that would sponsor three separate families and were off to the races. The impending presidential inauguration drove much of the urgency, since many predict the Trump administration will reduce or eliminate the program. The Welcome Corps itself has campaigned to get as many families into the country as possible by then, and offered grants to cover 60 percent of the required fundraising for groups that could apply by December 3.
By the standards of newly-formed groups of 27 volunteers who mostly don't know each other, things came together remarkably quickly. A week after the initial meetings, they'd sorted into groups based on a complicated calculus of availability, skill, and interests. By the second week they'd assigned roles to own the key areas: Treasurer, housing, employment, benefits.
By the third week, they'd submitted their grant application in time for the fundraising grant, which is more than just a few rote details. Applicants needed to demonstrate a thought-out plan for securing benefits, finding housing, and raising funds. Each person then had to sign a commitment form and submit to a state-department-grade background check. All pulled together over Thanksgiving weekend.
Now, they're waiting to hear back, expecting about a month's notice before arrival. Their sponsored families could come from anywhere in the world and might contain multiple generations. All three groups signed up to support families of up to 6 people, which will almost certainly mean children. The three families likely won't know each other and may be from completely different areas of the globe.
For now, they're focused on fundraising and general preparation. They've made contact with landlords and apartment managers to see who has the ever-elusive family-sized units available, and what it would take to get a family into housing that doesn't have a credit history or demonstrable income. (Often, that means paying a larger deposit or multiple months' rent at once, having a group member willing to co-sign on a lease, and/or finding a landlord sympathetic to the program's goals.) They hope to place the families in or near the neighborhood, where the group can be more present and offer better on-the-ground knowledge.
A GoFundMe fundraiser was already nearing its goal of $18,000 across the three groups when, late last night, an anonymous donation of $10,000 pushed them over the line. Surplus donations will help the family clear the debts incurred from travel.
Longfellow Welcomers: Katja Amyx, Mary Bach, Annika Brindel, & John Brindel, Dez Bryant-Senes, Angela Butel, Leah Jaslow Combs, Sarah Edwards, Emily Garber, Kristin Green, Andrea Hansen, Emmy Higgs Matzner, Esther Kearney, Melinda Kernik, Laura Masulis, Patricia Mitchell, Hillary Oppmann, Anne Parker, John Ratigan, Hannah Scherrer, Shailendra Singh, Cristina de Sobrino, Eliza Tocher, Nadya, Alex Weck, and Eva Zewdie.
You can learn more about Twin Cities sponsor groups here.
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