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For Guelph businessman Jim Estill, sponsoring 220 Syrian refugees was simply doing the right thing
A Guelph business man welcomes 200 Syrian refugees
SINCE BEGINNING this journey of bringing Syrian refugees to my hometown of Guelph, Ont., the question I’ve been asked repeatedly is “Why?” Why choose to help this cause and not others? Why choose to go to all the trouble? Why choose to give so much time and money to people I’ve never met? I didn’t know this was going to be a big thing. To me, it was just a math problem: how much do I need, how much do I give away. Well, Guelph has a population of 131,000 people, so for me to bring in 50 families, that is just doing my part. I figured that it would cost $1.5 million. I had the means and opportunity to help so I did.
Obviously, we are formed over our lifetimes. I grew up in Woodstock, Ont., and in order to be a business leader, I believe you need a lot of self-knowledge so I spent my life trying to learn about myself. At some point, I started saying, “Do the right thing.” I’ve repeated it probably 10,000 times. That’s what I say to my staff about how to do the job – how to treat a co-worker, how to treat a customer, a supplier, what to do when you ship a faulty product – you do the right thing. And when I saw what was going on in Syria, I couldn’t really stand by.
Because I’m a businessperson [Estill is the CEO of Danby, an appliance manufacturer], I approached this like a business. I set up directors of food, housing, transportation, mentorship. That is the only way to do it on this scale. We now have a network of 800 volunteers and more than 30 refugees working here [at Danby]. We created a program called Ease Into Canada, which has a focus on ESL [English as a Second Language] but we give any refugee, including ones I didn’t sponsor, a 90-day job because people need references and people need experience. And it’s another way to help learn English in addition to school or in a classroom. We do lunch buddies: that way, you don’t have an Arabic table and an English table. Everyone is paired up to talk about the weather and the water cooler.
The measure of success in this project will be when you have 58 families working, paying taxes, buying groceries where we buy groceries. Our job is to get people to independence. Guelph is already very multicultural. It is a university town, and the greater Guelph community has been very supportive. So many interfaith groups have been involved: clergy, churches, different mosques. My wife and I were at dinner recently in Elmira. A Syrian family was doing a dinner for its host family, which was a Mennonite church. It was so interesting, with all the Mennonite women wearing long dresses and bonnets, all the Muslim women wearing hijabs. This gives new meaning to all different walks of life coming together.
At the same time, a community has sprung up among the refugees. They had to get rid of some cultural biases themselves. For instance, I brought in some Kurdish people, who are not necessarily liked by the Arabic people. But their culture in the end is more similar than not. They have bonded over that. Over there, the groups are distinctly different. But over here, they’ve seen a lot of love from their mentors and support groups. It makes people question their approach to humanity.
I get so many heartbreaking emails all the time. The hardest task of all was deciding which families to bring in. It is like playing God and it causes lost sleep. There is such pressure on the families that do come, and they of course want to bring over their own families to be reunited. I hope reunification is the next wave. That is the way for our larger community to grow strong and healthy.
I don’t want to overemphasize it, but you are saving people’s lives, and there is nothing more gratifying than seeing a five-year-old having fun and having a real life and not worrying about bombs. I keep a gratefulness journal, and one of the things we can be grateful for is where we are born and where we live. We Canadians are so fortunate. —As told to Leanne Delap