‘Airbnb’ for refugees
Montrealers launch program that connects newly arrived Syrians with Canadians willing to offer them free short-term housing
MONTREAL— Gene Johnson has spruced up his basement suite in Scarborough, going so far as to replacing an aging oven. Gonzalo Riva is clearing out an unused spare bedroom in his Toronto apartment.
They are just two among hundreds across Canada offering a bed, a basement or a rental unit free of charge for those in need of short-term accommodations through We Host Refugees, a program being touted as the “Airbnb solution” for Syrian refugees.
Hatched this fall by a small group of young entrepreneurs from Montreal, the charitable endeavour to deal with the urgent housing needs of the 25,000 refugees expected to arrive in Canada by February is catching on through social media and the informal refugee support groups emerging to deal with the needs of the new arrivals.
Riva, a 31-year-old entrepreneur who lives with a roommate in a three-bedroom apartment at Dundas and Dufferin streets, heard about it on Facebook one day. It didn’t take much convincing for him to offer up the extra bedroom, which would normally be sublet to a stranger or a friend.
“We have this opportunity as Canadians to help and we often tell ourselves these stories about how great we are and how much of an open place we are, but I’ve been really quite surprised about the fact that there is even a debate about refugees,” he said.
“It just doesn’t seem like who we are, so I’m kind of glad something like this exists for the people who are also surprised there is a debate. They can live these Canadian values that we always hear about in grade 10 civics class.”
The idea for the program began in back in September as images of thousands of Syrian refugees risking their lives to make it to Europe were streaming across Canadian television screens.
Jenviev Azzolin, who is leading the initiative, said she and a few friends from Montreal’s tech start-up community got together to discuss their frustration and feeling of impotence.
“It grew into the idea that we should be doing something. We’re start-up people. We can start things and technology might be a great way to do something.”
The initial thought was to launch the program in Turkey, which the United Nations estimates is home to more than one million of the nearly 3.9 million Syrian refugees. The plans changed when the Liberals were elected in October and set about implementing the plan to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada.
The all-volunteer program is currently screening potential hosts who are willing to open their doors — free of charge — for those in need of temporary shelter. They could be the government-sponsored refugees who will begin arriving from refugee camps in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan in early 2016. They could also be privately sponsored refugees who need a temporary arrangement until they can move into more permanent lodgings, said Azzolin.
Roughly half of the potential hosts are from Ontario and a third are from Quebec. But there are also people showing interest from as far west as Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, and as far east as Nova Scotia.
“I’ve had people sign up that have a farm in Beeton, Ont.,” she said. “For somebody who comes from a farm in Syria, it may be a much better situa- tion for them to also be on a farm.”
In addition to serving as a potential host, Johnson, 59, is volunteering with the group and conducting pre-interviews with others in Toronto who want to offer up their homes to Syrian refugees. We Host Refugees says more than 600 potential hosts have come forward so far. Johnson has interviewed nearly two dozen.
“Everybody is very sincere. Some people may not have what’s needed to be a host but other people certainly do and a lot of them are former refugees themselves. There are refugees from Jamaica in the 1970s when they had civil unrest there, some from South Africa during the tran- sition from apartheid, refugees from Sri Lanka,” he said. “Everybody said they came to Canada and it’s worked for them and now they want to try to make it easier for other people.”
Take Riva, for example. In the 1980s, he came to Canada at age 5 from Peru with his family as economic migrants — sponsored by an uncle who worked with IBM.
“If things had been just slightly different and if I had been born not in 1980s Peru but in 1970s Peru — which was nuts — or if I had been born in 1980s Argentina or any little thing like that, then suddenly I’m not coming in through the front door. I’m coming in as a refugee,” he said.