How a Group of Toronto Neighbors Joined to Help Syrian Refugees

John Sewell was visiting Oswego, N.Y. (population 18,000), last year when a fisherman directed him to the local Holocaust museum. Surprised, he discovered a former 1812 military base had been converted into America’s only refugee camp during the Second World War. Unable to persuade Congress to loosen its quotas, then-American president Franklin D. Roosevelt instead invited 982 people fleeing Europe — most of them Jewish —to live there as his personal guests in 1944. The townsfolk adopted its newest members, introducing them to American cooking and baseball.

The story of local generosity and creative solutions to red tape inspired Sewell. If the American president could do that, why not the city of Toronto? And if the townspeople of Oswego, why not his neighbors on Hilton Avenue north of the Annex?

“That’s what most of us are like,” says 75-year-old Sewell, the former mayor of Toronto. So far, nine households have signed up to help sponsor one Syrian refugee family. They call themselves the Hillcrest Sponsorship Group, after the elementary school on their street. Here are four of them.

http://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/how-a-group-of-toronto-neighbors-joined-to-help-syrian-refugees/