A Berlin-based website Refugees Welcome, described as an ‘Airbnb for refugees’, is helping people fleeing from Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Senegal, Somalia, and Syria, find homes in Germany and Austria. Launched by a couple in November 2014, the website matches asylum-seekers with people willing to share their homes with them.
So far, the website has over 800 German hosts and has placed 134 refugees in homes in Germany and Austria. Those who have opened their homes to refugees include carpenters, PR consultants, single mothers, retirees, and students aged between 21 and 65. Two of the site’s founders, Jonas Kakoschke, 31, and Mareike Geiling, 28, live with 39-year-old Bakari, a refugee from Mali.
Kakoschke told Al Jazeera that this is a chance for refugees to move out of mass housing. “Mass housing is usually placed far outside the main cities which makes it really hard for the refugees to participate in German society. They are excluded and isolated, usually somewhere in a village or in small cities,” he said.
According to Refugees Welcome, users register their space on the website by providing some basic information, after which they are put in touch with a person who has fled to their city though a refugee organization. Once a roommate match is made, the group offers a few options to help hosts finance the rent they might otherwise be receiving for the space they are offering to a refugee – private micro-donations, crowdfunding or requesting state support for housing a refugee with approved residency. In a third of the cases, costs are covered either by the job centre or social welfare payments, and a quarter of the rents are paid for via micro-donations to the website.
What a lovely idea: Airbnb but for Refugees http://t.co/W5fVnXadxl I need to see if the US has anything like this.
— Ginny Ghezzo (@GinnyGhezzo) September 19, 2015
“We are overwhelmed by people’s readiness to help. We are now receiving inquiries from different countries within Europe such as Greece, Portugal and Scotland, but also from Australia and the US. Everywhere, people are keen to realize this idea in their countries to be able to offer refugees a home,” the group said.
In France, the group created a new “room-finding” program called Calm (Comme a la maison), where they connect volunteers to the refugees. Just like Airbnb, those offering their homes are in charge of how long their guests can stay, which ranges from a month to one year.
Germany this year already has registered more than 300,000 asylum seekers and it expects the number of refugees to quadruple this year to 800,000. German Chancellor Angela Merkel believes the record number of migrants and refugees arriving in Europe from war-torn countries could become a bigger issue for the European Union than the recent Greek debt crisis.
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