Belgium has run community sponsorship since 2020, with a clear division of labour between the state and civil society. The framework works. What almost stopped it in Aalst was something no framework can supply: somewhere for a family to live.
The framework
“In Belgium, we’ve been implementing community sponsorship programmes since 2020,” says Manon Koepp, Project Officer at Fedasil, the Belgian reception agency. “Throughout the year, we developed our programme and made some adaptations.”
The roles are unusually well defined. Fedasil coordinates nationally and prepares refugees before they travel: experts go to the first country of asylum, meet each person individually, carry out medical and social screening for each family unit, and deliver a Belgian cultural orientation known as BELCO, “to make sure they make an informed decision before they transfer to our country”. Fedasil is also responsible for matching refugees with sponsor groups.
Caritas International Belgium recruits and structures those groups. “We have our social media channels,” says Jesse Wouters, Integration Coach at Caritas. “We also have our connections with partner organisations, with dioceses, for example. So that creates a nice mix of groups.” Interested groups get a no-obligation information session first, then a detailed meeting where roles are divided — “so that later on it’s also clear for the refugee family who can then come back with certain questions to certain people within the group”.
Then there is the part the framework cannot solve.
“The main challenge we’ve been facing for community sponsorship is the lack of affordable houses for this programme. This is really a huge challenge — but not only in Belgium, it’s actually all across Europe.”
The school with a spare apartment
In Aalst, the volunteers went looking. “I thought: yes, we’ll never find a decent home within the budget,” one of them recalls. “But then it went more smoothly than expected, thanks to the school here in Aalst.”
IÑIGO – Sint-Jozefscollege had an apartment standing empty. The school offered it for rent and entered into a collaboration with Caritas.
Erik Kuypers and Liesbeth Van den Bossche, the school’s infrastructure director and general director, describe the decision as barely a decision at all. “It simply fits with the inspiration of our school.” Their core business, they say, is the upbringing and development of young people - “and teaching them to make a difference too”. The welcome group brought that within reach of the students, who could contribute directly.
“If, in buildings we have at our disposal and where we have room to allow such projects again, it seems logical to me that we continue with it.”
A group assembled on purpose
The welcome group did not exist before the project. It was built, deliberately, by Lieven Meert.
“It started with my friend Annelies, who saw the project announced on a Fedasil website and suggested to me: why don’t we do this together and look for some people?” From there he recruited by skill: his sister, who has medical training; Fleur, who had experience supporting refugees; Francine, who taught Dutch; and Luc, a friend of hers, who had been a guardian of unaccompanied minors.
“We did try to be as diverse as possible,” Meert says. “And in that way it also works well, because we are able to divide up the tasks.”
When the match with Eugenie and Innocence came through, things moved quickly. “I actually put out calls on Facebook for beds and cupboards and who knows what else,” says Luc Dendooven. “Within a week it was all sorted.”
What the volunteers are actually for
Dendooven’s description of his role is deliberately unromantic: helping the family with their documents, putting them in touch with civic integration and the relevant services.
“If I compare that with people who don’t have that support, that’s an incredible added value,” he says. “Because our society isn’t geared toward integrating these people quickly. There are too many, especially administrative, obstacles.” Language compounds it. Innocence had assumed Belgium meant French - “but here in Aalst that wasn’t the case”. Everything happens in Dutch.
And then he describes the discipline that makes the difference between sponsorship and paternalism:
“I could do some things on my own, but I consciously chose not to. Every time I went to the municipality, to the city, or to the school — for everything, I always took Innocence or Eugenie along.”
The link nobody sees
Alongside the welcome group, Caritas and Fedasil run a peer-to-peer project: workshops where resettled refugees come together and share what they have lived through, in their own language.
“The activities take place in the mother tongue, which allows the training to go well and to be well understood,” says Marie Rose Manariyo, Intercultural Mediator at Caritas International Belgium. “They can express themselves freely and easily, and let out their feelings.”
Her own role is to act as the link between the families and everyone else - the welcome group, the municipality, the social services. “These are people who face a language barrier, a cultural barrier, a barrier at the level of mentality as well. People who are newly settled in Belgium without necessarily having an idea about the new laws, the new cultures and the new mentalities.”
“Today, we truly came together”
Eugenie and Innocence were matched over a video call from the first country of asylum. “Is that you, Innocence?” “Yes, it’s me.” “Eugenie, are those your children?” “Yes.” “Are you ready to go to Belgium?” “Yes, it would be a pleasure.”
In Aalst, what they describe is ordinary and, on inspection, not ordinary at all. “Here, I feel good. I get along well with the neighbours. I feel that this place has welcomed me well. So I’m in the right place.”
“Normally, we’d just greet each other, everyone heading out of their own home, quickly, in passing. But today, we truly came together. That’s a big thing, and it made us genuinely happy.”
Their plans are specific: learn Dutch and master it, find work, get the children into school - and buy a home of their own.
One year, and afterwards
Community sponsorship in Belgium runs for a year, and Caritas is candid about what that means. “It’s difficult to say that after this year the family is fully integrated,” Wouters says. “It is certainly a first step. But we do see that the relationships built up throughout the year continue to exist. Which is very important, because there is still a lot of work after one year. It doesn’t stop there.”
“Integration is something that keeps going on. And when you are truly integrated into a new place - maybe that’s never. But this project is a big step toward making it easier.”
For Fedasil, the case is institutional as much as humanitarian. The main benefit, Koepp says, is “a way to involve civil society in the integration of newcomers in Belgium. It’s also a way to diversify our expertise within society.”
What other countries can take from Aalst
The Belgian framework is worth copying: separate the roles, prepare people before they travel, train the group before the family arrives, and make explicit who in the group does what, so a family knows which person to ask about school and which about health.
But the transferable insight is smaller and less official. The constraint on community sponsorship almost everywhere in Europe is housing, and the organisation that solved it in Aalst was a secondary school with an empty apartment and a mission statement it took seriously. Not a housing agency. Not a public authority.
Every European town contains institutions holding property they are not fully using (schools, parishes, religious congregations, municipalities, universities). Most have never been asked. In Aalst, one was, and said yes because it fit the inspiration of the school.