Category: innovation

Pre-arrival settlement services were funded by the Federal Government in 2005. It took them a while to shift to digital service delivery. Now that is the norm. This report looks at the published data on outcomes and provides recommendations to the sector.

As part of the two-year, national research project funded by the WES Mariam Assefa Fund entitled “Envisioning the Future of the Immigrant-Serving Sector,” ACS-Metropolis Institute, the Mhor Collective Scotland, and GEO Nova Scotia partnered together to pilot and tailor the delivery of the Digital Champions program for the Canadian settlement sector, a holistic “train the trainer” approach to delivering peer to peer support for newcomers to advance digital literacy.

Digital transformation is more than the tech or software used to deliver services: it’s approaching current models for service delivery in ways enabled by technology. This makes digital transformation a human process as well as a technical one, requiring human support to implement. A settlement sector organization in Nova Scotia, ISANS, is addressing the human element of digital transformation in their support of staff and clients.

What has the settlement sector learned from the COVID-19 pandemic? What knowledge do we want to carry into the future? This article considers the need for innovation in online service post the COVID-19 pandemic, and propose sharing and dissemination of resources as the best approach to long-term project sustainability.

This article draws on PeaceGeeks’ tech expertise and 6+ years developing and scaling Arrival Advisor (AA), an award-winning, multilingual mobile app that provides newcomers to Canada with recommended information and services tailored specifically to their needs, circumstances, and immigration status, to offer lessons learned, recommendations and potential risks for the sector and its main funder to consider at this time of rapid digital transformation.

Refugee 613’s Digital Messaging for Settlement and Integration (DMSI) project has explored the benefits of addressing this challenge by offering newcomers free, easy and fast access to settlement information in their own language and customized to their needs, via off-the-shelf apps on their smartphones. This article discusses the learning from the latest DMSI pilot, the Afghan Digital Service, which uses a private, moderated group on Telegram to provide key settlement information to more than 700 Afghan newcomers.

In the fall of 2020, ACCES Employment (ACCES) launched a virtual assistant powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI). VERA (Virtual Employment and Resource Attendant), responds to inquiries about our programs and services, helps users self-register for upcoming events, and offers resources that are relevant to users’ queries. VERA is a chatbot interface on our website and operates behind the scenes within our Facebook Messenger app. She runs on IBM Watson Assistant and Discovery technology.

This article explores how to create team readiness for adoption of new AI tools in a service provider organization and how an informed and engaged staff ensures that AI adoption in settlement is consistent with organizational values.

This article makes a case for understanding the experience and needs of immigrants and refugees with using virtual care in relation to its ability to deliver compassionate care—that is, characterized by trust, dignity, positive patient-provider relationship, empathy, and respect. Authors propose using intersectionality as a framework for this inquiry. By understanding if and how immigrants and refugees experience virtual care through a compassionate lens, we can ensure that their perspectives and needs influence how we design systems of care.