Workshop Report: The Share Refugee Advisor Workshop for Community Sponsorship

The Share Refugee Advisor Workshop for Community Sponsorship took place on Zoom on the 25th of January and provided a platform to exchange and discuss best practices for meaningful participation of refugees. This preliminary workshop was organised under the umbrella of Share’s Refugee Sponsorship Mobilisation Platform which among its objectives, seeks to ensure that refugee voices are represented in advocacy at the local, national, and EU level through the development of a Refugee Advisor Programme for Community Sponsorship.

The workshop was attended by over 50 participants from across Europe, Canada and the United States with the majority of participants having direct experience from the field, either as sponsored refugees, refugee students, volunteer sponsors, intercultural mediators, or training and lead sponsors organisations. The event featured presentations from the VOICES network in the UK on their sponsorship ambassador programme, as well as from R-SEAT - an international initiative working to increase the participation of refugees at the global and national level in a meaningful, sustainable, and transformative way. We also heard from New Women Connectors, a migrant and refugee-led organisation that uses a gender transformative approach to advocate for changes in EU migration policies. Most importantly however, the workshop provided a meaningful opportunity for attendees to co-design and give feedback on proposed features of the advisor programme as well as discuss what would be the most effective tools to communicate refugees’ views.