Community support for refugees

Building a life in a new country takes more than a healthy bank account. Refugee families need friends and a community to help them navigate through the first few overwhelming weeks and months.

Ottawa Centre Refugee Action (OCRA) is a grassroots group of volunteers who came together to help refugees settle in Ottawa. We work with a broad base of partners that includes community organizations of all kinds – anyone interested in working together to provide much needed help to refugees fleeing conflict or persecution in their home countries.

Since January 2016, we have helped settled 12 families (37 people, from 75 years to 18 months) in Ottawa.

We are now focusing our efforts to help the close relatives of our refugee families. The single most important issue that our refugee families have identified, over and over again, is the plight of their close family members who were left behind and are living in vulnerable circumstances in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq.

We are looking to raise the funds and gather the volunteers needed to privately sponsor these family members. Our existing OCRA families are stepping up to participate extensively in the settlement plans for their family members. We are grateful to be partnering again with First United Church of Canada for purposes of co-sponsoring our refugee sponsorship applications; administering refugee support payments for the 12 month period after arrival, and accepting donations.

We invite you to get involved, whether as an individual, a family or a small group of friends. It doesn’t matter where you live or whether you have experience settling refugees. We can use your help.

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