Community Sponsorship is a community activity and we strongly recommend that you hold a public meeting before fully embarking on the process. As well as informing the wider community about your plans to welcome a refugee family to the locality, this is a good way to recruit members and to allay any concerns people might have about the project. 

The first step is to:

• invite friends and neighbours (and their friends and neighbours)
• use local media and social media outlets to advertise your meeting
• approach local institutions like churches and clubs to ask them to tell members about the meeting
• print leaflets and put them up in shops and noticeboards and - if you can - do some door to door deliveries
• personally invite local people of influence and power 
• ask your local Volunteering Centre to share the opportunity

Attachment - Template For Running Order For a Community Meeting

Should you have a Community Sponsorship group nearby which is further in the process, it is always a good idea to invite them along to speak.

Sponsor Refugees can help you too by sending along speakers who have personal experience and expertise in welcoming refugee families through Community Sponsorship.

Contact us to arrange a speaker and/or to find out if you have any nearby groups: [email protected].

Registering Interest

Make sure that you have a way to capture people's details at the event - and a place where people can register interest in joining the group, even if they couldn't join the meeting. You could have a Volunteer Registration Form for example - Take a look at an example form here.