NEWS

Midtown churches join Syrian refugee aid effort

When the photograph of three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi began circulating across traditional and social media Sept. 2, it galvanized support from Canadians nationwide.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto launched Project Hope, a 100-day campaign aiming to raise $3 million to help settle 100 Syrian refugee families within the GTA.

Reverend Andrew Stirling, senior minister of Forest Hill’s Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, has been one of several midtown religious leaders to take action.

Stirling says he knows the Syrian crisis predates a heart-wrenching photo and will take much longer than the current news cycle to address.

AdobeStock_refugees_welcome“Timothy Eaton has a long history of sponsoring refugees, from the Vietnam boat crisis right through to recent history,” he said. “So our response to this has been the way we respond to every crisis that comes along: with reason and compassion.”

At the moment, Stirling said the Timothy Eaton congregation is considering one of three courses of action: sponsoring a Syrian family, sponsoring a family from elsewhere to alleviate the pressure on Syrian aid groups, or sponsoring an emergency relief organization.

“We haven’t decided yet as a congregation which one we want to do,” he said. “But when we do, we’ll see them right through, right to their children getting an education.”

Francesca Mallin Parker, director of community involvement with Grace Church-on-the-Hill, said her congregation had discussed sponsoring a Syrian refugee family before it became headline news, and already had a family known by a member of its congregation in mind.

However, she’s since learned the sponsorship process can be a very lengthy and expensive one. Sponsored refugees often take a year and a half to arrive, then need up to $30,000 to support their family for a year.

“There are a lot of bureaucratic hoops to jump through,” Parker said.

Michael Wills, chair of Yorkminster Park Baptist Church’s refugee committee, said the church has made an ongoing program of sponsoring one family per year if it can.

With help from the Office for Refugees, Archdiocese of Toronto, which provided a list of suitable refugees, Yorkminster Park’s refugee committee is currently sponsoring two sisters, 18 and 24, who fled their birth country Central African Republic and are now in a United Nations refugee camp in Ghana.

Wills said while the congregation recognized the “tremendous” need for help with Syrian and Iraqi refugees, “the trouble with the government allocating numbers to Syrian and Iraqi refugees is they had reduced the number of African refugees.”

But, as Wills can attest, sponsorship is not always a quick process. Despite submitting all paperwork through Citizenship and Immigration Canada, the sisters will have to wait a little more than six and a half years before coming to Canada because of a backlog.

“Obviously something needs to be changed to streamline the process,” Wills said. “It’s insane.”

Syrian refugees can receive an accelerated referral, with government officials pre-selecting families they deem suitable — or in great need — of coming to Canada. Wills said the Yorkminster refugee committee recently discussed sponsoring an Iraqi or Syrian family in addition to the sisters.