Angelika Bauer laughs as she remembers the first time her Syrian housemate Jawad Shalghin met her dog Bo. “He was a bit afraid because people tend not to keep dogs indoors in Syria, but they get on better now. Bo no longer barks when Jawad comes home, she has accepted him,” she says with a smile.

The 63-year-old retired lawyer from Hamburg invited Shalghin, 21, to stay with her family a month ago, after she met his girlfriend Sahar through her volunteering work. He had fled from civil war in 2015 and was granted asylum in Germany a year later. He had a place to study business administration at Hamburg university but nowhere to live, so Bauer offered him a room for free.

Retirees make up a core group of the volunteers helping to integrate the large number of refugees who have been arriving in Germany since 2015. In 2016 alone, 433,910 received refugee status through normal asylum channels, many of them from Syria, having made the perilous journey across the Mediterranean.

While there is no conclusive data on volunteer numbers, a study by the Bertelsmann Foundation said there could be anywhere between 500,000 and a million people helping the new arrivals settle in. Many of them, like Bauer, offer up their homes. The report noted a growing number of volunteers are retirees and a large proportion come from an academic background.

Research by Olaf Kleist, at the Osnabrück-based Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies shows that the number of volunteers who are over 60 has increased from 24% in 2014 to 40% last year. “In general older people can play a crucial role in integrating refugees into society. Not only do they provide contacts, knowledge and resources for refugees, they contribute also to the creation of an open immigrant society,” Kleist says. “That this transformation is carried out by pensioners refutes some misconceptions about older sections of society being more likely opposed to migration. In fact, one of the reasons why the integration of refugees in Germany succeeds is because of pensioners’ long-term commitment to supporting newcomers.”

As well as offering up her house, Bauer spends about 10 to 20 hours a week working on various refugee projects in Hamburg, including Start with a Friend, a partly government-funded scheme that has matched 3,000 people arriving in Germany with residents by encouraging friendships and a support network. “When people are retired some go on the board of foundations or others play golf. But some, like me, will want to do something that give us a sense of purpose and keeps our minds active,” says Bauer. “We older people feel more obliged to keep to one thing and there is a fluctuation in young people as they move about or they go abroad to study and get a job,” she adds.

Jawad Shalghin: ‘Older people can understand us in a better way, they have patience. We have learned lots of cultural things from them – meals and songs’ Photograph: Oliver Hardt/Getty Images

She also contributes to Fluechtling-magazin – a magazine written mainly by new arrivals into the country – set up by Hussam Al Zaher, a Syrian journalist who came to Germany as a refugee in 2015. Al Zaher says relationships with refugees and retirees can fit well. “For Syrians, family is the most important things. Our grandparents are the most important people, then our parents and so on. There is a saying, ‘(the person) who is one day older than you knows one year better than you’. We have a lot of respect for older people.”

Shalghin, who says he and Bauer have taught each other a lot, says many new arrivals often find it easier to talk to older people. “They can understand us in a better way, they have patience. They can listen to us and wait until we get the right words and we have learned lots of cultural things from them: meals and songs.” While his older brother is in Germany, the rest of Shalghin’s family are still in Syria. “I miss my family but it is a comfort to have found Angelika. I see her like an aunt, somewhere between friend and family, I remember when I first arrived we went for a long walk by the big river Elbe with Bo the dog and with my girlfriend. It was after a storm and we talked a lot and saw lots of beautiful things. Another time she looked after me while I was sick, bringing me tea,” he says.

The growing core of older volunteers is just one way that people are taking it upon themselves to help new arrivals in the country. Other innovations include an Airbnb-type scheme called Refugees Welcome that has helped 400 refugees find a home, a job-matching mobile platform that has 16,600 refugees signed up, and a coding school for refugees.

These schemes, however, have their challenges. Mareike Geiling, founder of Refugees Welcome, says that with the rise of the popularity of the far-right AFD party their work has become more difficult. “This mood has led to fewer registrations of offers of accommodation on our website. Twenty thousand refugees are registered but we only have 15 available rooms per month. This is what makes our work difficult but we have matched lots of people successfully. This is what keeps us working.”

In the UK far fewer Syrians have been accepted as refugees since 2015. In addition to conventional asylum applications – 9,944 of which were accepted last year (the majority from Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan) – the government has resettled 8,535 Syrian refugees referred directly by the UN High Commission for Refugees to the Home Office which performs eligibility, medical and security checks and then refers them on to local authorities. It has promised to welcome 20,000 Syrian refugees in this way by 2020. Supplementing this resettlement programme is a Canadian-style community sponsorship scheme, which is designed to help the public offer support to refugees through volunteering.

One organisation supporting its development is the community-led organisation Citizens UK, which runs Sponsor Refugees. Those who want to be involved have to be a registered charity or align themselves with an umbrella charity. They must raise £9,000 and find accommodation for the refugee family before they arrive, as well as presenting a plan for how they will help new arrivals integrate.

So far, only 12 families have come over via the scheme, but the hope is that a few thousand families will be sponsored annually. Tim Finch, director of Sponsor Refugees, says: “In the early days, it was taking about six months for the groups to establish themselves, submit an application and be assigned a refugee family but the process is getting quicker.” He adds: “In lots of parts of the country housing is scarce and expensive. That is maybe the single biggest obstacle, though groups do find imaginative ways to overcome it. Another challenge is the fact that people have to take on a big responsibility for a long period of time.”

Finch believes that there are lessons to be learned from Germany’s response to the migration crisis, the biggest one being it shows the desire communities have to help. “Too often the kneejerk response of European governments is to assume that their voters want to keep refugees out. Angela Merkel’s response was different. But I don’t think the German government would have managed if it was left just to them. There is great power in the community. We want the government to make the most of that.”

Eddy Hogg, lecturer in the Centre for Philanthropy at the University of Kent, says that politics can play a big part in leveraging the power of the community. “The German government has invested billions in housing and integrating asylum seekers. olunteering does not exist in a bubble. So in a country where there is broader political and public support for refugees then there are likely to be more volunteers offering to support volunteer organisations.”

“One of the main lessons the UK can learn from Germany is the value of government investment,” he adds. “The best way to encourage voluntary action is to set the lead by funding something, by saying this is something worthwhile.”

Bauer agrees: “Integration can only work if there is no fear and everyone is open-minded and willing to learn from each other. Me and Jawad have shown what can be achieved when this happens.”

A Home Office spokeswoman says: “This government is committed to supporting vulnerable refugees who are caught up in conflict and danger and, in 2016, the UK resettled more refugees than any other country in the EU [through the UNHCR resettlement programme]. We have pledged to resettle up to 3,000 vulnerable children and family members from the Middle East and North Africa as well as 20,000 refugees affected by the Syrian conflict by 2020. “But we are clear that we do not want to incentivise perilous journeys to Europe