Migration  and  Resilience  in  York  Region:  Supporting  flexible  information  access  across  multiple  communities (webinar recording)

In this August 2021 Building Migrant Resilience in Cities webinar researchers presented a project that documents how access to information influenced collective resilience, settlement, and social inclusion among Yazidi refugees and Turkish-speaking refugee claimants in York Region.

What do you need to know?

Information access is essential for newcomers to achieve successful resettlement and social inclusion. Among Yazidi refugees and Turkish-speaking refugee claimants in York Region, trust was a central factor in determining information seeking strategies. Trust in information sources was shaped by newcomers' social networks and formal agencies' capacity to meet newcomers' needs, as well as pre-migration social and political factors. Increasing groups' capacity to provide mutual support was suggested as a promising way to ensure access to relevant and useful information.

Presenters:

• Michaela Hynie, Department of Psychology / Centre for Refugee Studies, York University
• Trisha Scantlebury, Public Policy, and Evaluation, United Way Toronto

The project focused on 4 questions:

1. How do different newcomer communities in York Region access information about the services they need and use? Two communities of interest were identified in consultation with community partners, focusing on how and when they access information, and how they would prefer to do so, in order to achieve their goals. Different communities prefer different types of information at different times.
2. How do service providers in York Region navigate and disseminate information for their clients? Front-line service providers need to be able to adapt to the shifting needs and interests of clients from multiple communities, and do so within the resources and activities available to them. Researchers sought to identify what strategies service providers use to disseminate information to multiple communities and identify gaps and challenges they experience in doing so.
3. How have organizations in York Region adjusted to the needs of newcomers? Organizations need to continually assess and respond to the changing needs of the communities they serve, or to shift focus between communities. They are also navigating shifting funding landscapes.
4. How do institutions maintain flexibility so that they can stay relevant, culturally appropriate, and ready to act? They need to be ready to serve arriving migrants with distinct migration histories and social characteristics.

How can you use this research?

Three main recommendations emerged for improving newcomers’ access to accurate and useful information.

1. Since newcomers’ information access strategies are complex and shaped by pre- and post-migration factors, strategies for sharing information must be tailored for each community. Agencies need time and resources to learn about the political, social and cultural history of each newcomer group.
2. Providing services in newcomers' preferred language is essential and plays a central role in trust-building.
3. Building community resilience by supporting each group’s own strategies to enhance community-led information initiatives may be effective in ensuring access to accurate, relevant, and useful information.

Presentation slides:

Here is a useful research snapshot of the project:

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript of the webinar using Otter.ai. It may contain errors and odd sentence breaks and is not a substitute for watching the video.

Trisha Scantlebury 0:00
Hi, everyone, I'm Tricia Scantlebury . And I'm manager of research public policy and evaluation. And I'm here with Michaela Hynie who's going to be co presenting with me. Today, we're going to be talking about some of the research that was done on information access and collective resilience for newcomer communities, specifically, the navigation of formal and informal support networks by these IDI population as well as Turkish speaking comers in New York Region. Okay, so just before getting started, similarly, just want to acknowledge the research team, by July jancy, primary, Chelsey and Laura who all did fabulous work on this project. So I am here and Mikayla is here representing by the people on the screen did the bulk of the work, we're just kind of we're speaking on behalf of them today. So in terms of the study purpose, the purpose of this study was really to explore the relationship between access strategies and collective resilience strategies that were used by recent newcomers in your region. And the way that the research team thought about and defined collective resilience was by thinking about the capacity that groups have to overcome social and environmental challenges through the use of agency sees through social learning and adaptability, adaptability, and the capacity is dependent really on the availability of, of resources at the personnel community, the communal and institutional level. So what this research really validated for us was the importance of information access as being a key aspect of collective resilience. The way that the team went about actually doing some of identifying the groups that we were going to work with, was United Way hosted three different community consultations with newcomer serving agencies. And so the question that the kind of the main principle question that the consultations that came out of the consultations was what research would really help organizations to address the current challenges, as well as to maximize the current opportunities. And where was the and the answer that came out of that was really there was a need to understand newcomers lack of access to appropriate and timely information in terms of finding in to identify and to settle their needs, so to settle issues around housing, employment education. And so that was where the answer that was the result of the answer. And so the group, there was an advisory committee of about 14 agencies that really helped to guide the study, and that informed the direction of the groups that were identified. So through those conversations, the advisory committee identified two groups that they that they wanted to, there were two communities really of interest. So the first was the ZTE refugees. And they were identified, because at the time, their needs were incredibly complex. And there was a complex history that needed to be they needed to be explored as well and taken into consideration. And as the second group that was identified was Turkish speaking refugee claimants. And the reason why this group was identified was because there was an increase at the time of this population group within your region. But even though there was an increase within the region, there wasn't a lot of engagement, the engagement with service providers was quite low. So the advisory group wanted to kind of explore that a little bit more to get a better sense of why that was taking place. In terms of the data collection, as in the title, we kind of identified that there were kind of formal, formal assessments that were done as well as informal. So in terms of the formal aspects, so there was a series of focus groups to in particular that took place with a total of 15 participants. as well as two key informant interviews. And so the way that these participants and interviewees were identified was through those formal channels. So through agency relationships, there was also a focus group that was done with UCD refugees, and this practice focus group was, it took place in kurmanji. With the with that newcomer group, as well, there were eight interviews that took place in Turkish, with a Turkish speaking refugee claimants. So that was another way that information was gathered for this research through an informal process. And finally, there were a series of interviews that were done. So five are done in English or kurmanji, with easy depopulation, and then three were done in English or Turkish, with the Turkish speaking community, in order to get that better understanding of what the needs were and what some of the opportunities for that collective resilience strategies were they were. So now I'm going to turn it over to Makayla, who's going to talk to us a little bit more about that communities of focus.

Michaela Hynie 6:03
Thanks, Trisha. I want to speak briefly about these two communities and why they were communities of interest because the characteristics of these communities really shaped the information seeking strategies and the resources that they had available to them. The Yazidi newcomers are a relatively new group in Canada. This is a ethnic minority group in West Asia that has experienced a history of social exclusion isolation, but most recently, an increase in persecution that ended with genocide and mass displacement by ISIS in 2014. And as a result of that Canada launched the survivors of Daesh program and resettled 1400 US cities, with very little notice in Canada. And so community organizations were struggling to identify their needs and to respond to the really high levels of trauma that they had been experienced, to prior to arriving and the complex history that they had, and in particular, with the fact that they had a history of being quite excluded from mainstream society in the countries that they were coming from. In terms of the Turkish speaking newcomers, this is actually made up of multiple different groups. And while we have a large, Turkish speaking population in Canada that preceded this time, there's been a long history of migration from Turkey into Canada, there was a rapid increase in refugee claims coming from people residing in Turkey, particularly in the years 2017 to 2019, with almost 4700 People coming which represented almost 9% of all accepted refugee claims in those years. And there were two main events that were really driving this, this increase in refugee claims. One was the collapse of the peace process with the PKK. And the resulting urban warfare and displacement of large numbers of people in Kurdish cities. The second was arrayed against imposition of emergency measures following a failed military coup, and that resulted in widespread dismissals, detentions and prosecutions across Turkey. Next slide, please. We did a group form of data analysis, where we did thematic analysis collectively as a team, and then did cycles of revisiting these data to come up with some themes, we're just going to focus on a small number of themes because of the time constraints of this particular presentation. And one of the things that we want to focus on is where they were getting information from. And there were two classes of information we were interested in whether they were using informal sources of information, there were concerns because this information can be inaccurate. And whether they are accessing formal sources of information, the majority of the individuals in these communities were accessing informal information sources. In the case of the ZT community, a lot of that information came from volunteer agencies or NGOs that in fact emerged around the arrival of the Yazidi community. So these are relatively new organizations responding in particular to the ECD community. In the case of the Turkish speaking community, there were already community organizations that they were connecting to on arrival. So there was a pre existing set of community organizations that they could connect to, and they relied on these organizations for a lot of their information. Both groups relied heavily on social networks. But the nature of those networks were quite different between the two groups. In the case of the Yazidi community, we had a very close tightly knit network of individuals with quite a hierarchical structure, which meant that they were leaders or gatekeepers within the community who did most of the communication outside of the community. information within those networks tended to be done in person or by phone and so there was a preference for people to reside in close physical proximity. In the case of the Turkish speaking community, those networks were actually a cluster of different communities that were quite close and very thick boundaries. There was a history of mutual mistrust between the groups because of the history of social and political divisions and differences prior to arrival. These groups really differed in terms of their structure. Some of these groups were quite hierarchical, others were much more horizontal in terms of the nature of the relationships between them. There was a lot of communication between the groups or within the groups rather rather than between the groups. And that communication tended to be through social media and as a result, there were fewer concerns around physical proximity. Next slide, please. In terms of formal information, seeking that was also undertaken. But in the Yazidi, this was primarily to settlement agencies, these EDI were primarily refugees, and as a result were connected to settlement agencies on arrival. Nonetheless, they had very low expectations both of what was possible and what could be offered from formal agencies. And they attributed this to a lack of information that they had received prior to arriving. So they felt that they weren't prepared for how agencies in Canada might be able to help them once they got here. In addition to seeking information about settlement, they were also very actively trying to seek information about how to resettle other family members who were left behind. And this was done in an organized way by some of the leaders but in a much more informal way, among other members of the community. In terms of the Turkish speaking newcomers, they used a range of formal services, they use settlement services, but also education, employment, and other sources for their information. They were quite knowledgeable about what kinds of information could be available to them, they expected services and expected information to be available, but at the same time, they were quite mistrustful about the quality and accuracy of that information. Both groups relied on informal networks to help navigate these formal services. So even though they were doing formal, information seeking they often accessed those services access, those sources of information through their informal networks are referred by informal networks. Next slide. In addition, the Turkish speaking groups engaged in a lot of self directed search. And here we're really talking about web searches. They were comfortable doing searches on the internet, they frequently engaged in confirmation of information sources through the internet, which they would sometimes describe as an exhausting process because they didn't trust the information that they were accessing. Both communities also use social media apps as a way of expanding their social networks. And they came up with creative ways of exchanging information, including memos that they shared on WhatsApp, and they also had transnational relationships, particularly among the Turkish speaking groups where they received information about resettlement prior to arriving by connecting with those community groups, virtually through social media. Next slide, please. What we saw in the way that these communities were seeking information was this reliance on and building of collective resilience. But a lot of that really came down to the core issue of trust for these communities. For both of these communities that were very high levels of mistrust of people outside of the community. And in fact of other groups from their own cultural background or ethnic background. Both of these groups reported ongoing persecution, threats, and fear of spying from transnational sources. And so they continued to experience high levels of mistrust and anxiety. The result was that they had to rely on one another in order to get trusted resources, or trusted information, and that both necessitated collective resilience but also help them build collective resilience because they came up with creative strategies for supporting one another in their information, search or invalidating information that they weren't, they weren't sure that they trusted. It was important to note that the way that these communities were structured and their own personal or social histories really altered the ways in which collective resilience operated within the communities and the kinds of resources that they had available to them and the extent to which they engaged in what could be thought of as almost a hub and spoke form of information seeking where you had gatekeepers doing most of the work versus individuals searching for information on their own. Next slide, please.

Michaela Hynie 14:58
When we try to map For all of the different factors that were affecting the reliance on formal versus informal sources, we came up with this image, you can talk about the kinds of resources that they had available to them at the institutional, the communal or the personal level. Trust, again was a central aspect of how these resources interacted in order to shape their reliance on formal versus informal information sources. In terms of personal resources that were available to community members. English language ability was key, those individuals who had limited English language ability expressed a great deal of mistrust of the information that they were receiving, and of the sources of information it made them rely more heavily on informal sources and social networks. Computer Literacy was related to English language ability, those who could search the web and could do so in English, were more likely to be able to find information on their own. And we're also more likely to be engaging in accessing formal sources of information because they could access them through the internet. This tended to be related to English language ability, as well as to their own personal histories of education, background and digital literacy training. At the communal level, trust was very much a community level phenomenon. And it was also relinked to the existence of previous communities in Canada. The presence of an established community meant that individuals have trusted groups in Canada that they could rely on. But it also meant that they relied more on those informal networks to help them navigate the system and as a source of information. There were also a number of factors at the institutional level that played a role in whether or not they were accessing formal information and the extent to which they trusted formal information. institutional readiness was a really key element. Unfortunately, because these IDI came so quickly, there were some missteps around engagement with this community and with their needs. So an early aspect of their resettlement was that they were provided with services in Arabic, which was a misstep because for the Yazidi community, this represented the language of the people who had in fact perpetrated the genocide and persecution against them. And it resulted in an increase of mistrust, and a retraumatization of some of the individuals in the community. The migration pathway also played a lot.

Michaela Hynie 17:39
Sorry, I just lost my screen here. Don't know what happened, the migration, everything went blank. The migration pathway also played a major role. In particular, people who are coming through refugee resettlement programs are automatically connected to settlement services. And as a result, they automatically had access to agencies and agencies knew about their arrival so that they were able to start preparing to meet their needs. For refugee claimants, their access to settlement services is not clearly demarcated. And as a result, settlement agencies did not necessarily know about their varied needs. And they were not readily in communication with them. Next slide.

Trisha Scantlebury 18:27
Thank you, Michaela. So our team has been discussing a series of recommendations that we want to kind of put forward, they'd have to obviously do with the collective resilience aspect. But we're just going to highlight two for you today in the interest of time. So the first is really to examine the existing service delivery models in order to identify some of the opportunities that can be provided to to help newcomers to assess, or to access to access more information and to and to strengthen their capacity there. So we think that there is definitely an opportunity to kind of take what is already what is already in play, but maybe just make some modifications in order to make it just that much more efficient, efficient, and that much more enabling of that electric resilience model. And then the second really is to, you know, going back to your conversations around social capital. So it's the the idea to develop more community based programs in order to build that social capital. And that's that intra connecting, so to be able to have both the bridging and the bonding, so to strengthen the relationships and community that exists, but also what are the kind of outward pathways that can be bridged to other other programs, other organizations, other other ways of thinking? So it's really those two elements that we're putting forward, but we're going to continue to develop them recommendations these are the ones we wanted to share with you today so that concludes our presentation but we're happy to take questions