by Bob Wilson, COFA Committee
You may have caught the announcement last month: the Community Refugee Integration and Settlement Pilot — CRISP to its friends — has officially become a permanent part of Australia’s humanitarian migration program, effective from 1 July 2026.
It’s run by Community Refugee Sponsorship Australia (CRSA) in partnership with the Commonwealth government. Since 2022, it has matched more than 950 refugee newcomers with trained Community Supporter Groups in every state and territory.
An independent evaluation by the University of Queensland found the settlement outcomes genuinely impressive.
Read the model again and see if it doesn’t ring a bell. Five or more volunteers, welcoming a household from the day they land, sticking with them through that hardest first year of settlement. That’s not a new commitment to us. That’s what we commit to as active members of a COFA circle.
It’s not entirely a coincidence, either. COFA joined CRSA as a Supporting Community Organisation back in December 2025. The CRSA team out of Sydney will continue to run engagement events here in Adelaide, South Australia annually.
So the door’s already open — the question our Management Committee is chewing over now is how far our Circles, new and established, will go with it.
Three paths are on the table.
Our larger, more established Circles could register directly with CRSA as a Community Supporter Group, taking on a newcomer household from the moment of arrival. This might be a step too far for some groups as their ongoing commitments to their current set of clients might take all their resources and time.
Or a COFA Circle could partner with a new or existing CRSA group, backing them with fundraising and on-arrival support rather than running the whole show.
Finally, we could actively seek to set up and register new Circles of enthusiastic newbies and seasoned COFA members to take on this challenge.
My own hunch is that it’s worth chasing the first option where a circle has the numbers and the appetite for it — it puts our experience exactly where it’s most useful, welcoming a family from day one.
But there’s a genuine role for the second as well, and probably no reason a circle couldn’t do a bit of both.
It’s a case of a national program finally catching up with what a handful of us have been doing around kitchen tables for years. If your circle wants to talk it through, grab me or drop the committee a line — five volunteers and a spare room’s worth of goodwill, and you’re most of the way there already.