The Centre for Multicultural Youth Issues (CMYI) held a series of consultations and forums in 2007 to explore the role of sport and recreation in supporting refugee and migrant young people to 'settle well' in Australia. This article presents some of the findings documented in Playing for the future (Olliff 2007), the discussion paper that emerged from those investigations. The potential benefits and problems associated with the use of sport and recreation in this context are discussed and recommendations made for future areas of research.