In the eye of a compassionate storm
Lifeline Syria project manager harnesses Canadian generosity
This is what a hurricane of kindness looks and sounds like: five phones ringing in the small, windowless room that is Lifeline Syria’s office.
Two of them are Alexandra Kotyk’s cellphones.
“You’re awesome,” Kotyk says into one cellphone before rushing over to answer the land line ringing in the corner.
“That’s wonderful,” she says. “Thanks very much for offering.”
Lifeline Syria is a campaign to bring1,000 Syrian refugees to Greater Toronto within two years. It was launched last summer by more than two dozen high-profile Torontonians in response to the flood of Syrians fleeing their country’s civil war. If the Canadian government wasn’t going to sponsor them, they said, private citizens would, just as they did in 1979 with 33,000 boat people from Indochina.
Kotyk was hired as Lifeline Syria’s project manager. Until last week, she was the only paid staff member, working with a group of eight core volunteers.
That was just fine before Sept. 2, when the flow of potential sponsors was slow and steady. Kotyk had no road map — the 1979 campaign called Operation Lifeline occurred in the era of telexes — but she was piecing one together. She planned to submit 10 cases to Citizenship and Immigration Canada this month as test runs. Then, on Sept. 2, the lifeless body of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi swept onto a Turkish beach.
“We had 1,500 emails in 48 hours,” says Kotyk. “I myself had 600 to 700. Our server couldn’t handle the emails. It crashed a couple of times.”
The phones in Lifeline Syria’s bunker-like office on College St. sprang to life. They haven’t stopped ringing since.
Before Alan’s death, 31 sponsorship groups had signed up with Lifeline Syria. Now, there are 224.
Kotyk has trained, or is currently training, all of those groups personally. She hasn’t taken a day off since Sept. 2. Besides answering phones, she’s been briefing Syrian Canadians, meeting donors, fielding media calls, giving public presentations, overseeing volunteers and eating only when someone puts something in front of her, that someone usually being her mother.
“I live in the basement apartment in my mom’s place,” says Kotyk. “My mother has being putting food in my fridge.”
The bookmark in the novel at her bedside, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, has not left page 103 since Sept. 2. Instead of reading it, she lies in bed working her two cellphones.
Kotyk, 29, tripped into the field. She’d dropped out of Ryerson University during her first year studying contemporary arts because, she says, “I didn’t know where it was going.” From there, she apprenticed as an electrician for a few months, but that didn’t suit her any better.
So when family friend Ian McBride told her his only staff person at AURA had moved away, she offered to help until he found a replacement.
AURA, formerly the Anglican United Refugee Alliance, is a charity that oversees the sponsorship applications and settlement of privately sponsored refugees for about 500 Anglican and United Church congregations in southern Ontario.
Kotyk never left. Within a month, she was working there full-time.
“I started answering the phones and people would say, ‘Can you help my brother?’ You could tell how desperate they were. You never wanted to not be there to answer the phone and talk them through the process.”
Social justice runs in Kotyk’s blood. Her maternal grandfather was wellknown child psychologist Manford Sonstegard. An American, he was ac- tive in the civil rights movement and moved his family to Ethiopia to work with USAID. His daughter, Valerie Sonstegard — Kotyk’s mom — remembers being kicked out of middle school after her dad denounced capital punishment on the radio.
Kotyk was sponsorship director at AURA for eight years, spending much of that time finishing her degree part-time at Ryerson. With only two paid staff, she did pretty much everything. Then, when McBride suffered a heart attack three years ago, she took over the reins.
“She’s the youngest of the crowd, but she’s very smart, very capable, very knowledgeable,” says McBride.
Kotyk has helped hundreds of refugees come to Canada. Most she doesn’t consider friends because “you want to make sure people don’t feel obligated to you in any way,” she says.
But there are a few exceptions — including a Lifeline Syria volunteer who goes by the name Moe. A Syrian, he recently arrived in Toronto after an 11-month sponsorship process quarterbacked by Kotyk.
“I love her,” Moe says. “I would read her emails over and over again. Just knowing she was there. Oftentimes, you have no one. Think about it. Nobody. Nobody. She was there.”
Kotyk smiles at Moe while on the phone with Jacqueline Swaisland, a prominent immigration lawyer who is offering her services pro bono, along with 30 of her colleagues across the city. This week, the students at Dewson Street Junior Public School announced they were sponsoring a Syrian family and challenged other schools to follow suit.
Kotyk is now planning to file sponsorship papers for 1,000 Syrian refugees by the end of this year, “as a starting point.”
Yes, she’s tired and overworked. But standing in the eye of a compassionate storm is exhilarating.
“It just shows how wonderful this country is,” she says. “I don’t know how you wouldn’t be proud to be Canadian with this.”