NewsWUSC and SUS team up to sponsor refugee students

WUSC and SUS team up to sponsor refugee students

How two student-led organizations are giving opportunities for refugee students

This article was published on November 10, 2021 and may be out of date. To maintain our historical record, The Cascade does not update or remove outdated articles.
Reading time: 3 mins

The SUS WUSC Student Refugee Program has sponsored their second refugee student this Fall. Each UFV student pays a $2 levy in student fees a semester to sponsor a refugee student to study at UFV.

WUSC and SUS have formed a partnership that will allow them to sponsor two refugee students in Fall 2022, including one from war-torn Afghanistan. WUSC sponsors a refugee student for their first year in Canada, paying for all housing, living, and schooling expenses, while getting them established into the community and connecting them with employment opportunities to allow them to live sustainably after that first year. The costs for sponsoring a student is approximately $25,000 a year per student.

UFV welcomed their first refugee student in January 2020, two years after first forming the committee. The fundraising process to bring this first student to Canada was unsustainable, according to the co-chair of WUSC in 2020, Catherine Taekema. So, WUSC proposed a referendum to SUS during their board meeting in February 2020 to add a $2 levy onto student fees, which is how 75 per cent of WUSC chapters across Canada are funded. The referendum was passed in April 2020, with 675 students voting. The fee increase allows for a more sustainable source of funding for this student-led committee to continue providing post-secondary education to refugees.

The referendum also ushered in a partnership between WUSC and SUS. Holly Janzen, current co-chair and campus engagement coordinator of WUSC, said in an interview that SUS supports WUSC in managing their finances, their budgeting, and their sustainability efforts. However, the two still remain independent from each other.

“Something exciting recently that has happened in the last meeting we had with them is that we’re going to be able to sponsor two students next Fall, and the reason we’re able to do that is because they’re providing 50 per cent of the costs for the second student,” said Janzen.

Duncan Herd, Vice-President of SUS, clarified that in WUSC’s original referendum to SUS, they were a bit mistaken in their numbers based on the information available to them, so what they budgeted for was only enough to cover the expenses of roughly 1.5 refugee students to come to Canada. This means they could only bring one student a year, and were left with a bit more of a surplus than a non-profit organization would like to have.

“The situation in Afghanistan is obviously an outlier,” said Herd. “The national WUSC committee had asked our chapter and all the other university chapters to see if they could bring an additional student in this time of need … so we had the idea of utilizing some of the funds from our student referendum, in regards to our COVID-19 credit that was given back to us by Studentcare … taking some of these funds and putting it toward this.”

Herd said that this “top-off” was an extraordinary measure in one specific instance and SUS is not planning to give this kind of money to WUSC annually. However, Herd said there are ongoing conversations about raising the levy slightly so that WUSC is able to bring two refugee students a semester. Herd has done his research with other Student Unions in schools with WUSC chapters, and students at UFV pay an under-average levy, with the average being somewhere around $6.

The UFV chapter of World University Service of Canada (WUSC) is one of many committees all over Canada committed to providing access to post-secondary education to refugee students. WUSC is a non-profit organization based in Ottawa that strives to create inclusive educational and economic opportunities for youth around the world, regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual identity. The Student Refugee Program sponsors over 150 refugee students to study at more than 100 post-secondary institutions across Canada every year.

Image: UFV WUSC

Other articles

Andrea Sadowski is working towards her BA in Global Development Studies, with a minor in anthropology and Mennonite studies. When she's not sitting in front of her computer, Andrea enjoys climbing mountains, sleeping outside, cooking delicious plant-based food, talking to animals, and dismantling the patriarchy.

RELATED ARTICLES

Upcoming Events

About text goes here