Category: innovation

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.

In response to COVID-19, Together Project's staff and volunteers had to quickly adapt and pivot their programs in order to continue providing social support to newcomers in Canada. In this webinar, they share their insights.

This webinar outlines three of the most popular open source Learning Management Systems and identifies features and affordances of each.

John Allan, a dedicated volunteer for TESL Ontario, presented the webinar, 'Coping with COVID-19 Using Online Instruction'.

This TESL Ontario webinar focused on educational technology that might be useful for language instructors working with adult English language learners.

It’s never been more important to share how we’re doing. Share successes, new models of service delivery, but also the struggle. I’ve been enjoying seeing how immigrant and refugee-serving agencies have been successfully pivoting to online services. I’ve been enjoying even more how some are sharing their experiences. There is so much to learn from each other.

In this interview, I surface conversations I’ve been having with Chris Friesen of ISSofBC. We talk at what settlement work looks like now, during a pandemic. What are the opportunities the sector needs to seize? What does the funder need to understand? What do we need to understand about the digital divide and digital literacy of the newcomers and communities we serve? And more.

At a workshop a couple of years ago, I asked a group of participants to break into groups and identify the top four things settlement workers need to know, top four skills that they must possess, and the top four work-related attitudes and behaviours in the era of digital service delivery. Interestingly, there wasn't much overlap between groups. This suggests the richness of human service work, as well as its complexity.

One thing that I'm learning about the future, from futurists, is that it's not something we can predict. But it's something we can work toward.