It costs roughly $23,000 to support a family of five for a year in Guelph, Canada. When a local businessman made that calculation, he also made a decision: He would put up the money to help resettle 50 families of Syrian refugees.

“I did not want to be a person who stood by.”

Jim Estill, CEO of Danby, a large appliance company based in Guelph, was watching the news about Syria in the summer of 2015 when he realized that he wanted to do something.

“It was the buildup of media that I saw–that Syria was in deep trouble, and people were drowning to try to get away from the peril,” he says. “I had once heard a rabbi speak in New York who said that part of the problem with the Holocaust is that people stood by and did nothing. I did not want to be a person who stood by.”

Unlike the U.S., Canada has a private sponsorship program, originally established in 1978 to help the country accept more Vietnamese refugees. Of the nearly 40,000 Syrian refugees that Canada accepted between November 2015 and December 2016, more than 13,000 were privately sponsored.

“I believe in private sponsorship, primarily because it’s not about the money, it’s about people settling well,” says Estill. “The government can only really give money; they can’t hire friends.”

After meeting with local religious organizations and aid agencies, Estill began the painful process of choosing who could come. The number of families he decided to help went from 50 up to 58–more than 200 people–and the first refugees began to arrive in the summer of 2016.

Estill created a volunteer organization to help new arrivals with every part of their lives in Guelph, from making doctor’s appointments to how to ride the bus. “The government could issue you a bus pass, but if you don’t speak the language and you don’t know the geography, that’s daunting,” he says. “You want someone to ride the bus with you.”