Learning at an Inflection Point
From 2021 to 2024, HIAS and its partner agencies were at the forefront of a national effort to innovate how the United States welcomed refugees — by mobilizing local communities. This period followed the near-collapse of the U.S. refugee resettlement system under the first Trump administration, as resettlement actors made innovation a central strategy in rebuilding. The HIAS network tested and scaled multiple models of community sponsorship, including co-sponsorship, which matches refugee families with both professional caseworkers and trained volunteer groups. HIAS undertook a learning project to capture what this period of co-sponsorship taught us before an even more abrupt upheaval to resettlement in 2025.
As of this writing, resettlement has largely ceased, benefits long available to refugees are being rolled back, and some of the agencies and staff who carried out this work have been lost. Amid these shocks, this learning exercise took on new meaning. In addition to preserving critical knowledge, the exercise also presented an opportunity to explore a model for community mobilization and its potential applications in a changed world.
This report captures what HIAS learned from four years of fast-moving program delivery and experimentation, at a moment when creative solutions to support forcibly displaced immigrants are more needed than ever.
What We Did
This report is informed by insights from over 100 people closest to this work. HIAS held interviews and focus group discussions with 49 refugees, 33 volunteers, and 34 resettlement agency staff who participated in the co-sponsorship program across four sites, from Chicago to San Francisco’s East Bay to New York City to Framingham, Massachusetts. We complemented these conversations with administrative data from the HIAS case management system and validated emerging findings with partner agency staff.
What We Learned
Refugees who experienced community sponsorship in the HIAS network recommend that it continue. Newcomers described volunteers as accelerating the process of integrating into their new communities with confidence. Without volunteers, one said, “we would have struggled a lot more, and it would have taken us longer to adjust.” Many newcomers emphasized that volunteers’ presence relieved the isolation that so often accompanies displacement. As one put it, “I didn’t feel alone here.” Refugees who were interviewed consistently called for others to have access to community sponsorship in the future.
Volunteers make a difference through trusting relationships, not just tasks. Looking beyond the government lens of “core” versus “non-core” services, volunteers’ contributions fall into six roles: accompany, link, advocate, inform, advise, and fund or resource. A core insight: newcomers should set the pace of the relationship, so it never outstrips the trust that has been built.
There was no single model of co-sponsorship in the HIAS network. Six percent of all refugee households resettled during these years were matched with co-sponsors; some locations had none, while others reached a third or more of resettled cases. Each configuration optimized for different results and scaled program requirements accordingly. Local programs varied match timing (pre- versus post-arrival), duration (three months to a year or more), and volunteer groups’ financial commitments (from none to $20,000 recommended).
The program’s intensive, highly relational commitments run counter to national trends toward episodic volunteering. Volunteer co-sponsors who took on leadership roles or repeated the experience with more than one family tended to be highly motivated, socially networked self-starters. Experienced volunteers described the work as a labor of love which many found “astonishingly rewarding” individually and enriching for groups’ home institutions.
Co-sponsorship requires strong systems for coordination between newcomers, volunteers, and resettlement agency staff. Roles, responsibilities, and flows of information tended to require continual negotiation if not clarified early and often. Offboarding proved just as important as onboarding: clear transition pathways and deliberate decisions about extensions support families in achieving self-sufficiency and volunteer groups in preventing burnout.
Where to Go From Here
During this period, national goals remained broadly defined with local programs contextualized according to sites’ varying needs and priorities. Any future co-sponsorship design should begin by articulating its “true North” in terms of desired impact, and building targeting, training, and measurement around it. Depending on its aims, a program could optimize for maximizing additionality (increasing the number of overall arrivals), mitigating risks for the most vulnerable cases, filling funding gaps, extending staff capacity, accelerating integration, mitigating psychosocial stress, or mobilizing a volunteer base. Each choice carries potential secondary benefits as well as tradeoffs which should be weighed carefully.
While the outlook for resettlement remains uncertain, leveraging the knowledge and relationships built through community sponsorship on behalf of forcibly displaced people need not wait. Conversations across sites point to a potential for movement-building on the foundation of community sponsorship that has yet to be fully tapped. Experienced volunteers have hard-won expertise and demonstrated follow-through which could power direct service and advocacy alike.
Recommendations
- Define and measure program results as part of a robust theory of change; standard reporting from the 90-day post-arrival period is not sufficient on its own.
- Standardize and document case selection criteria so that outcomes for sponsored families can be compared with those of similar non-sponsored cases.
- Prioritize coordination and volunteer management framework. Ensure every site has a dedicated volunteer coordinator, strong orientation for volunteers to the role of case managers, and functional channels for case communication throughout the sponsorship period.
- Emphasize peer learning and mentorship among volunteers. Look for ways HIAS can provide structure and facilitation. Consider an advisory or consultative group of experienced volunteer leaders to leverage their expertise.
- Explore ways to engage volunteer groups in support of additional populations — refugees with continued support needs and immigrants with other statuses.