Syrian refugees Ibrahim Al-Rabid, Ayoush Al-Jassem and six of their children are some of the more than 1,200 refugees that arrived in Utah this year. The family waited almost seven years before they were granted asylum in the U.S.
In October, they boarded a plane to Utah, where an eager group of twelve Salt Lake City neighbors waited to welcome them.
After months of training with the International Rescue Committee, the group was assigned as the family’s “community sponsors.” Those are people ready to help the family navigate their new home — doing everything from helping with housing and furniture and driving them to appointments to getting the Al-Rabid kids registered in the same schools their own children attend.
Jesse Sheets is the director of development and strategic initiatives at the International Rescue Committee. He said the program started as a way to fill in the gaps in services.
It’s “that next level of volunteerism,” Sheets said, “where a group has organized itself, has raised funds and resources, and then has committed volunteer time to supporting the building blocks of resettlement.”
Every refugee family is assigned a caseworker, who may have 15 to 20 families at once. Sheets said the community sponsorship team “really helps deepen and broaden the service provision and helps alleviate some of the resources.”
Sheets added that the program also provides these families with a long-term network of supporters that would otherwise take them years to build in a new community. Ibrahim Al-Rabid agreed.
Through an Arabic interpreter, Al-Rabid said his community sponsorship team has helped him the way a relative or friend might have back in Syria.
“We feel like a heavy weight is gone from our shoulders,” he said.
Dianne Orcutt helped form the community sponsorship group supporting the Al-Rabids. She said the idea for the group started when she and a neighbor got interested in supporting local refugees.
“I think we were just looking on the internet to see what a group of people like us could do, and we came across community sponsorship.”
They found the page explaining the program on the International Rescue Committee’s website and decided it was a good fit. Orcutt sent an email to a neighborhood listserv looking for more people who might be interested.
Orcutt said she didn’t know many of her neighbors before they put together the community sponsorship group, but now she feels close to them.
“It has been so good to know my own neighborhood,” she said.
Once the Al-Rabid family arrived, Orcutt said she was pleasantly surprised how quickly she bonded with the family.
“Like I just genuinely like them, I consider them friends, I enjoy spending time with them,” she said.
Four groups have formed in Salt Lake City since the International Rescue Committee started this program at the beginning of 2022. Eventually, they’re hoping to expand the program to include up to 12 community sponsorship groups a year.
