Welcome to episode 23 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this conversation I’m speaking with Dave Montague and Carrie Moody from Findhelp Information Services in Toronto. Among other things, they manage the 211 service in the Greater Toronto Area.
I’m chairing the Task Group and would love to connect about your experiences, challenges, successes, and ideas to move the sector forward toward digital and hybrid service delivery models. Let’s connect so we can learn from your experiences.
I keep seeing new reports and research coming out, as well as platitudes from business leaders about how we don’t harness newcomer talent enough in our labour market, and that we really need to especially given lower immigration numbers during COVID and our existing and coming economic economic crisis and if this sounds like a run-on sentence it is because I’m, like you I’m sure, so sick of hearing the same old same old about labour market barriers to full participation for newcomers and it’s just so blah, blah, blah without action.
Earlier this Summer I learned that the New Brunswick Multicultural Council (NBMC) had been doing some innovative coordinating work with member agencies after everyone pivoted to remote work. I was curious about their work with member agencies to develop policies and tools and share best practices. In this conversation Abby David shares how NBMC worked together as a provincial sector and what the fruits of that work have been.
This afternoon I participated in a World Education Services (WES)-sponsored Twitter chat, with the hashtag #ImmigrantsThrive. I thought I’d share my answers to their questions, along with some resources others shared that I found interesting and useful.
Laura Mannix is the Director of Community Development at DIVERSEcity Community Resources Society. I spoke with Laura to talk about her work bringing social innovation culture into her organization, as well as how DIVERSECity has been able to pivot remotely. We talk about what all of that has meant for the kind of community work that they do and how it relates to newcomer and community engagement as well.
Welcome to episode 20 of the Technology in Human Services Podcast. Be data driven. Make your decisions based on data. We’ve all heard the platitudes. And data is something that the immigrant and refugee-serving sector has huge amounts of, and does very little with. In 2017, the Toronto East Quadrant Local Immigration Partnership started looking into changing that.
So, the short answer is I don’t know. But what I do know is that we can learn from others. So, here are some examples of digital professional development and education in other sectors that we might as well study, learn & borrow from, and build on.
This is a recording and notes from presentations at an immigrant and refugee-serving sector-only virtual event on June 16, 2020. I was honored to moderate the panel. The panelists focused on technological adaptations made to settlement service delivery due to COVID-19, share promising practices and challenges, as well as other outcomes from the sector discussion.
Welcome to episode 19 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode, I chat with Victoria Esses.