The Privilege of Hosting
I never expected to become a ‘host’, which is strange really as my husband and I recently worked out that we’ve had friends or guests living with us for over half of our marriage. Several of the people who have lived with us were from outside of the UK, and we’d also spent several summers hosting foreign students for a few weeks at a time.
We felt a close connection to friends in Ukraine, and were involved (partly through our work, and mostly because of a visceral desire to help) with early relief efforts. However we discounted ourselves from hosting, thinking our spare room was too small, and our children’s needs too great (our daughter has severe learning disabilities). To be honest I now realise we set unrealistically high standards for what a host family should be like.
Like many families, our guest came to us through a very informal matching process. A new Ukrainian friend in Eastbourne (whose husband we had known many years before) asked me to share on social media the information and photo of someone she knew from her home church in Kyiv who needed a host family. I hesitated to share it, and wondered if we could be the answer.
After furious measurement of the room I went back to my friend, and asked her to take a look. Could it be big enough? She replied that this lady was currently living in a crowded house in Poland having come from an even-more-crowded one in the West of Ukraine, so yes the single room was probably big enough!
I initiated contact (with the help of Google Translate) and shared our willingness to help, but also the challenges that living with us as a family (particularly around the early wake-up times of our kids, tummy bugs, some extreme behaviours) might bring into her life. There were lots of opportunities for her to opt-out.
But I’m so glad she didn’t.
We have now been hosting for just over six-months, and by far the most difficult part of it was making that initial decision to take the first step.
So when I saw that good friends of Jubilee+, Hope at Home, had collaborated with NACCOM (who have a wealth of useful information on their website), as well as researchers at Nottingham University to produce a report on how the Homes for Ukraine scheme could help inform future hosting schemes, my ears pricked up.
Based on interviews with host families around the country, the report looks at why people host, what’s worked well, and what hasn’t, and – crucially – how the lessons taken from the lived-experience of hosts could help inform future hosting schemes (and hopefully broaden the group of potential hosts in the future!).
Jared and Helen Hodgson, who lead the Hope at Home team are in faith that the success of the Homes for Ukraine scheme will help normalise the practice of hosting, and that Christians will be at the forefront of this shift. Now, they are actively looking for households with a spare room who might take a tentative first-step. With this in mind, Hope at Home are holding an online information evening on 3rd April at 7.30pm (sign-up here).
Online sessions like these give the opportunity for those interested to ask any questions they may have about what its really like to host. Hope at Home also offer thorough host training and ongoing support as well as safeguards around the matching process.
There are multiple ways that our guest has improved our lives for the better (too many to count), and I consider it as one of the greatest privileges of mine to have been any support at all during such a challenging phase of hers.
We’re not the perfect host family, but I think you can take a concept like ‘good enough parenting’ (the gold standard in the world of fostering and adoption), and apply it here. By the grace of God we are good enough hosts.
And you could be too.
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Hope at Home is looking for new hosts.
Hope at Home provides safe homes for survivors of modern slavery, find out more about hosting via their website, and sign up for their next online ‘Explore Hosting’ event (3rd April, 7.30pm) by clicking here.
