By shifting our mindsets and harnessing the talent and creativity within our communities, we move together to build bright futures.
As Canada increases its targets to welcome historic numbers of im/migrants to strengthen the economy and address critical labour shortages, Impact North Shore is dedicated to offering a broad range of integrated services to support the unique journeys of im/migrants and their families in our communities. In order to achieve our vision of building equitable communities, Impact North Shore works with multiple partners for collective impact.
Responding to Im/migrants in the Changing Environment
We work with North Shore im/migrants to design integrated services that support newcomers and their families where they are on their unique settlement journey. In this last year, many newcomers who accessed our services have experienced disruptions in their settlement journey stemming from the pandemic and turmoil in their countries of origin. We welcomed over 500 Ukrainians to our services and collaborated with multiple organizations across BC and Canada to ensure they received the information, resources and support needed to establish stability in our local communities.
Adjusting our services to meet emerging needs has been a priority and success of this year. We proudly expanded our capacity to connect newcomers with mental health information and resources and increased our employment services to support youth, women, im/migrants and temporary residents to meaningfully attach to the Canadian labour market system. We increased the scope of our language learning programs and served more newcomers than ever before in our Settlement Workers in Schools services.
Building Collective Capacity
In the last year, we have engaged with multiple community partners to mobilize knowledge, wisdom and tools to increase im/migrant belonging and leadership. This year a highlight of our community engagement and innovation work included working with 70+ community service partners, local leaders and newcomers to establish a new strategic plan for the North Shore that will guide the work of im/migrant inclusion over the next 5 years.
Increasing our connections and partnerships with local employers was another significant success this year. This was achieved through job fairs, engagement with employers through our research project which challenged the concept of Canadian work experience and through the sponsorship of the new Excellence in Equity award in the North Vancouver Chamber’s Business Excellence Awards.
Moving with Our Partners to Turn the Dial on Equity
Together with our partners and through centering the voices of those with lived experiences, we identified systemic inequities and worked to build effective responses, deepened our learning and strengthened our commitment to Reconciliation and anti-racism. As we grow in our Reconciliation work, we engaged over 200 newcomers and community partners with opportunities to deepen their knowledge to learn about the land and Indigenous world views from Indigenous knowledge keepers. We explored developing de-colonized practices in our linguistic equity project. A success for this year was the collaboration of 20+ local organizations hosted by our North Shore Anti-Racism Network to develop a Responding to Racism protocol for the North Shore.
With our reach growing to touch the lives of thousands of people, we are deeply grateful to our funders, community partners, board, staff, volunteers, and all the im/migrants and newcomers who chose to live on the North Shore and engage with us. We look forward to moving together with you as we envision and build communities where everyone thrives and belongs.
Sincerely,
Yang Wang, Board Chair &
Wendy McCulloch, Executive Director
