Explore the importance of managing volunteer expectations
Volunteers come to sponsorship from many different backgrounds and belief systems. They may have very specific and personal expectations of how the process will unfold and what the support they will provide to the refugees they are welcoming will look like. Preparing to sponsor, before an application is submitted can potentially involve long searches for properties, coordinating with multiple authorities, and steep learning curves towards understanding benefits, education and health systems. The following resource provides some guidance on setting and managing expectations within Community Sponsorship. The content was created in collaboration with Community Sponsorship groups.
Experts by Experience
Relating the lived experiences of both those welcomed under Community Sponsorship and volunteers that welcomed them is a valuable tool in managing expectations. These Expert By Experience resources give insight into some of the real challenges and rewards of sponsorship and resettlement from the very beginning of the process to beyond the end of formal sponsorship. Seeing first person examples of the road ahead can give Community Sponsorship groups the motivation to persevere even as the initial positive expectations can be challenged by the process.
Pre-arrival contact
Families waiting years for resettlement may feel a significant loss of agency and control. Having a Community Sponsorship group ask about preferences like food, fosters collaboration, challenges assumptions, and helps contextualize them in a meaningful way around the individuals they are welcoming. Pre-arrival contact can also help volunteers gauge how autonomous the refugees are, helping them to set realistic expectations about support, empowerment and integration.
‘The excellent pre-arrival training provided by RESET is essential and goes a long way to preparing us as a group. However, it is best not to make assumptions based on what one has learned and to be responsive to the unexpected matters which occur’ (Community Sponsorship group member, 2024)
Post-arrival: mental health, empowerment and boundaries
‘The Community Sponsorship group is made up of volunteers. Explain what this means as this may not be a concept which they are familiar with. Volunteers all have commitments such as family and work’ (Community Sponsorship group member, 2024)
Following the early days of welcoming, where the sponsorship relationship develops quickly and expectations can be heavily challenged, both volunteers and the families they welcome can go through significant emotional highs and lows as they adjust to their new lives and roles. Until this time, all of the pre-arrival preparation is only hypothetical, but suddenly volunteers must take the knowledge they have built up and apply it to the unique circumstances of the family. This can lead to uncertainty and anxiety. At the same time, it occurs in the context of volunteers’ original motivations and desires of providing person-to-person support for vulnerable refugees, potentially refocusing earlier expectations in the context of actual sponsorship. A few critical concepts can help to reframe expectations and allow volunteers to focus on what is needed in the moment.
‘The whole process is a journey for both volunteers and families. I remember so well preparing a house ready for a family we had yet to meet, not knowing how they would like to arrange their living space, or what exactly to purchase in terms of groceries and soft furnishings. Over time, this house became a proper home, inhabited by people forging their own lives, surrounded by the things they needed and wished to have in their own home’ (Community Sponsorship group member, 2024)
‘Your flexibility will help the family to settle more quickly’ (Community Sponsorship group member, 2024)
Trauma and mental health
Research tells us that refugees are five times more likely than the UK population to experience mental health problems. Trauma and how it can manifest is often not well understood, making training essential to identifying and addressing mental health support that is needed as it arises. Sometimes these challenges can manifest in ways that can feel disheartening to volunteers, where they struggle to understand why their heartfelt efforts are not being received the way they expect.
The role of a Community Sponsorship group is never to diagnose or treat mental health problems, but to signpost refugees to different professional services that can help if they express the need. Making them more aware of the possible underlying challenges faced by the families they have welcomed is critical to resetting their expectations, refocusing their efforts, and directing them to the resources that can help them navigate mental health and trauma effectively. Reset offers a number of core trainings available to sponsorship groups related to this, including on gender-based violence, trauma informed care, and cultural awareness on origin countries. Feedback from participants has included:
‘I’m very appreciative of the time given to prepare and deliver this session. My understanding of trauma and how it may affect people, emotionally and physically, has greatly increased.’
‘One thing I found helpful was some validation that we are on the right track in our preparations, given our inexperience, yet hearing some further ideas.’
‘The main thing I need to try and do better is to be more empathetic than sympathetic. It was phrased in a way that was really easy to understand, so now I know where I’m going wrong and can do better going forward.’
Empowerment
Integrating into a new country, or community, is a very personal process and it is impossible to put a universal timescale on how long it will take for someone to feel truly integrated or what integration actually means to them. At the same time, volunteers may have strong opinions on what integration is needed, how long it should take, and whether the families they welcome are integrating at a reasonable pace. It’s helpful to think of integration as a journey which volunteers are helping refugees to progress along and remind them that they cannot control how integrated an individual will feel at any given time. Volunteers can work to empower refugees to make decisions for themselves and set their own goals which is the essence of Community Sponsorship – providing families with the tools they need to build their own lives.
‘I have learned so much from each of the people I have supported, and I have come to really appreciate that integration and progress comes from empowerment, and sensitive approaches to problems encountered’ (Community Sponsorship group member, 2024)
Setting boundaries
Setting boundaries is about aligning expectations between the Community Sponsorship group and the refugees they welcome. They can include things like establishing times when the group is available for non-emergency situations, deciding whether gifts between volunteers and family are acceptable, and agreeing on whether a group of volunteers will interact with a family or refugees individually or collectively.
Some groups have told us that they find it useful to think of what their group provides for refugees as a service – it has clearly defined parameters which tie into the empowerment approach they are taking. Others find that thinking in terms of support is helpful – they are there to enable the refugees to start their lives in the UK. Whichever way volunteers choose to think about this, what is crucial is ensuring a consistent approach .
The refugee or family may also have their own boundaries, and it’s important to encourage volunteers to discuss these boundaries regularly to ensure they keep in mind that this is a two-way relationship that they are creating, and this will change over time. Setting early and adaptable boundaries help to provide consistent support towards meaningful integration outcomes.
‘The emphasis should be on enabling them to navigate their lives in the UK. In our experience families find ways of making their own boundaries clear’ (Community Sponsorship group member, 2024)
Post-sponsorship: preparing to move on
Integration doesn’t just happen, it’s an ongoing process. It is important for Community Sponsorship groups to explore their expectations of supporting a family and the relationship that they will have when the required sponsorship period comes to an end. We encourage groups to discuss their capacities and motivations at this stage, including ongoing support needs of the family, the potential for reducing certain support to promote empowerment and signposting to other organisations if families need continued assistance after the initial sponsorship period. While it may not seem like an urgent matter at the start of sponsorship, setting realistic expectations about volunteers’ capacities long term are crucial to avoiding conversations later that may be surprising and upsetting for volunteers or refugees who had different expectations about how the relationship would evolve.
‘It is unrealistic to set a fixed timeline as to when people will be able to carry out specific tasks without support. There are families who we resettled who live independently from day to day but still seek advice with new or urgent matters’ (Community Sponsorship group member, 2024)
Reset training
Reset offers both pre-application and pre-arrival mandatory training for Community Sponsorship groups, complemented by core training and a self-led e-learning platform , which include several expectation management elements.
‘I found the initial Reset training which reminded us that these families were already well able to organise themselves, and that they had already shown great motivation and autonomy in getting themselves to the point of resettlement, incredibly humbling. It made me understand that my own assumptions were only there to be challenged and moulded by the shared experiences of helping the family begin to navigate their lives in a strange land’ (Community Sponsorship group member, 2024)