Sure. Thanks for the question, Mr. Baker.
There are 130 sponsorship agreement holders in Canada, many who have been involved since 1979. Over the past few years, since 2016—I have some stats here of landings—we have resettled over 18,000 privately sponsored refugees a year. I would say that's all of the privately sponsored refugees who've arrived in Canada, so not all of those numbers are reflective of the cases that sponsorship agreement holders have done. However, we do represent a significant number of the resettlement numbers.
We are a diverse association that is actively connected across faith-based, ethno-cultural and humanitarian networks with long-standing experience, having been involved in private sponsorship and the effective settlement of refugees for many years.
One of the realities that I would also mention is that we've grown significantly over the past seven years. We used to be about 80 organizations doing around 6,000 sponsorships a year, and over the past seven years we have grown to 130 organizations. Much of that growth is due to the Syrian response and the growing needs of refugees globally.
One of the important considerations around SAH capacity is that within our association we are diverse in how we are structured and the number of sponsorships that we do. When it comes to interest in Afghan resettlement, we did run a focus group and collected some stats. There are 66 sponsorship agreement holders who've expressed interest in engaging in the resettlement of Afghans and who have said they have the capacity to engage. There are 12 SAHs who are interested in doing more than 100 spaces.
That gives you a sense of where the interest is at within our association. I think many are eager to engage, but the reality is that 20% of the SAHs within our association have two or more full-time employees. The rest are either volunteer-run or have a combination of part-time staff and volunteers who are working together to facilitate sponsorship. While we do have the interest and the desire to scale up, to do that in a healthy way SAHs are asking for support to allow them to hire additional staff to manage the growing number of cases and to support quality settlement post-arrival.