NARBERTH LIKES to look after itself. Natives of the small town on the southwestern fringe of Wales are proud to have two independent butchers but no branch of Tesco, an otherwise ubiquitous supermarket. When their library looked set to close, they stepped in to man it. They took over the swimming pool when it faced being shut. So when their local authority seemed slow to welcome Syrian refugees, they thought little of taking on this task, too. The town’s only Muslim family, the Bataks of Damascus (pictured), moved in last July. Locals found them a house, filled the cupboards with food and—to the family’s delight—laid out prayer mats and a copy of the Koran.

Refugees arrive in Britain through two routes. Some make their own way and then apply for asylum. The luckier ones fly to Britain as part of official resettlement schemes, which seek to help needy refugees living close to their home countries. In 2015 David Cameron, the then prime minister, pledged to expand the second route to accommodate a total of 20,000 Syrian refugees by 2020.

Councils are usually responsible for helping them adjust to their new lives. But since July 2016, community groups have also been able to house resettled Syrians. They must raise £9,000 ($11,900), find a house which the refugees can afford to rent for two years and agree to help them for at least a year as they settle. Ministers borrowed the idea from Canada, where neighbourhood groups have rehomed 300,000 refugees since the mid-1970s.

Not every town was as enthusiastic as Narberth. Only 138 refugees have been sponsored so far, by 24 groups. A report in May by the Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration said that the government had been slow to capitalise on the public’s willingness to help Syrians. Exempting sponsored refugees from the government’s quota would help, campaigners suggest, since volunteers would know they were helping people who would not otherwise have been able to come to Britain. Bureaucracy is also a sticking point. Groups sometimes have to wait for a year while the Home Office assesses their capability and finds them a family; Narberth’s volunteers were asked to tweak their submissions three times. One of them, Jill Simpson, calls the application process a “drawn-out, bureaucratic nightmare”.

Yet the scheme is likely to grow. On June 18th the government gave £1m to Reset, a new organisation that will support potential sponsors as they make their applications. And it seems that once one group in an area sponsors a refugee, others learn about the scheme and submit their own applications. There is another group in Pembrokeshire not far from Narberth, and groups in Peckham, Streatham and Herne Hill in south London.

Evidence from Canada suggests that privately-sponsored refugees integrate more quickly into society than their government-supported counterparts. One study found that 50% of sponsored refugees had found a job within a year, compared with 10% of those helped by the state. They are more likely than other refugees to praise the help they receive and less likely to rely on food banks.

It is too early to tell whether Britain’s scheme will achieve the same results, but there are some encouraging signs. One sponsored Syrian refugee found a job with the Salvation Army in London. Another, who wants to open a restaurant in Manchester, was given seed capital by his sponsorship group.

One year on, Narberth’s volunteers are exhausted, but proud of their successes. Ahmad Batak and his family had not heard of Wales until a few weeks before they flew in. They were initially bemused by the complexity of bus timetables, bin collections and—most of all—by the changeable weather. “In our country, when it’s summer, it’s summer,” says Ziead Alsaouah, Mr Batak’s son-in-law.

But the volunteers helped them feel at home. They drove Mr Batak’s wife to a church knitting group, where she learned to crochet. They bought pigeons for Mr Batak to keep in his garden, as he used to do in Damascus. And they found voluntary jobs for Mr Batak and his brother and for Mr Alsaouah. When she learned that Mr Alsaouah was a talented woodcarver, one group member let him work in her shed. Locals clubbed together to buy him some tools and have commissioned him to make a house sign and a headboard. Perhaps the best omen of integration, though, is the arrival of his baby daughter, Maria. She was born on St David’s Day.