Open Collections

Derksen, Murray

University of British Columbia

Canada is one of the leading refugee settlement nation states in the United Nations, with private sponsorship at the vanguard of settlement in the country. Canada has a highly developed private refugee sponsorship program, with more than 70 percent of the private sponsorship groups registered with religious institutions. The main purpose of this exploratory case study was to discover the role and impact of religious institutions in refugee settlement in the City of Kelowna. Kelowna is a mid-sized city in the interior of British Columbia that has seen a significant increase in refugee sponsorship since the response of Canada to the Syrian crisis in 2015. Most of the private sponsorship done in the City of Kelowna has been through religious institutions, who have worked in collaboration with government funded settlement services and community partners. Through various churches and the local mosque, former refugees are being settled and integrated into this primary urban center in the interior of the province. Data for this study was collected through two research tools: a questionnaire survey distributed among former refugees in Kelowna; and semi-structured interviews with key informants. The following questions helped guide both the questionnaire survey and key informant interviews: What barriers and challenges do refugees face as they settle in a mid-size city like Kelowna? What coping strategies do refugees use when settling in Kelowna? What is the role and impact of religious institutions in facilitating refugee settlement experiences in Kelowna? What policy and best practice recommendations can be made to enhance the settlement experiences of refugees in Kelowna? The results of this study show that churches and the mosque have a direct impact by helping newly arrived refugees cope with the barriers and challenges they face. This case study discusses three primary areas of impact: bridging the language barrier between newcomers, service providers, and sponsorship providers; assisting former refugees to establish their new lives in Kelowna and move them towards integration; and helping to ensure that newcomers move towards prosperity rather than precarity as they re-establish themselves and their families in the City of Kelowna. Many potential areas of further study were discovered during this research project, some of them needing immediate attention. This study expands the existing body of literature around privately sponsored refugee settlement in Canada by studying the role and impact of religious institutions in refugee settlement in a mid-size city in British Columbia.

Text

2021-08-20

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/79358

Interdisciplinary Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/