The National Steering Committee on Technology (NCST), a committee aimed at using technology to better the Canadian settlement sector through the provision of improved services to newcomers. The committee includes 18 general members and 5 observing members representing settlement and integration sector service providers, stakeholders, and federal, provincial-territorial government.
The Future is Now: Strengthening High-Quality, Inclusive and Innovative Hybrid Service Delivery report uses recommendations highlighted during the past two years to lay the groundwork for the NSCT’s strategic plan. The report’s key recommendations identify the committee’s four goals and their priorities.
The four goals outlined were as follows:
The key conclusion of this report was that organizations and investors in the sector should work together to reimagine how services are designed and delivered in order to increase sector efficiency, capacity, flexibility and service delivery. This would be done through the committee’s recommendation of using hybrid aspects to improve these services.
Executive Summary
"Over the last two years, a significant amount of learning and innovation has occurred in Canada’s settlement sector. The pandemic has amplified the role settlement organizations play in enabling newcomers to actively participate in all areas of social, economic, and political life. The sector has increasingly learned, developed, and integrated technologies into service delivery. Moreover, there is an increased recognition of the complementary role newcomers and grassroots groups play in creating novel solutions that contribute to community resilience.
Yet critical gaps remain in moving towards a deliberate and sector-wide hybrid service strategy. These include lack of strategic planning, targeted investment, consistent attention, and dedicated resources to advance innovation and digital transformation. These gaps are further exacerbated by restrictive funding models that often discourage innovation.
In the last two years, a series of key reports by the Settlement Sector and Technology Task Group, Affiliation of Multicultural Societies and Service Agencies (AMSSA), Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), PeaceGeeks and the Association of Canadian Studies (see Appendix A), have helped to reimagine what a revitalized and digitally-enabled settlement model could look like. These reports make it clear that addressing these issues requires putting newcomers at the centre of service delivery and adopting the right strategy, skills, culture, and technology at pace and at scale.
It is not about making incremental improvements that make existing processes marginally better. Instead, it demands that organizations, together with funders and other stakeholders, step into unfamiliar and sometimes uncomfortable conversations, and completely reimagine how services are designed and delivered. To help the sector get there, our goal is to present sector stakeholders with the most salient considerations for hybrid service delivery.
The sector is now at an inflection point. Canada is considered a global leader today in welcoming and including newcomers into Canadian society. Canada now has an opportunity to also become a global leader in leveraging technology and innovation to streamline the newcomer settlement experience and strengthen inclusion. Without the right investment, this work risks failing to deliver the efficiencies, improved service delivery, and experiences that are possible.
Our consolidated recommendations set an ambitious vision where every newcomer is supported throughout their settlement journey with equitable, inclusive, and high-quality hybrid service delivery. The roadmap will help key settlement sector stakeholders take targeted actions to shape the future of the sector in Canada. It will further outline the guidance and resources needed to move this strategy forward.
Getting there requires a lot of work. To effectively achieve its mandate, the newly formed National Steering Committee on Technology requires dedicated, flexible and sustainable financial support in the form of a permanent Secretariat that can help the sector to advocate for and advance key priorities.
This report begins by outlining key gaps and learnings from the reports listed in Appendix A. Aligning with IRCC’s strategic vision, we then provide in-depth explorations of key findings in four major areas: Strengthening the Hybrid Service Environment, Enabling Innovation, Mobilizing Knowledge, and Ensuring High-Quality and Inclusive Settlement Services. We conclude by summarizing the main recommendations into what can become the foundation for a sector-wide strategy and action plan.
While each of the reports consulted focuses on different perspectives and priorities, the recommendations ultimately complement one another and collectively pave the way to a comprehensive sector-wide roadmap. This complementarity signals a shared readiness for and commitment to digital transformation across the sector. What is urgent now is to build on this momentum and take concrete action towards making this strategy a reality as the sector leads up to IRCC’s 2024 Settlement and Resettlement Assistance Programs Call for Proposals. The time to invest strategically and to catalyze this change is now."
You can download the PDF of report as well as access the key sections/recommendations in a series of posts. Each post pulls key recommendation sections from the report to make them more accessible. In each key post, I provide an introduction, along with each sub-recommendation narrative and specific recommendations relevant to the sub-recommendation.
French download - L’avenir, c’est maintenant : Renforcer la prestation de services hybrides de haute qualité, inclusifs et novateurs
What is this research about?
Researchers looked at the landscape of technology solutions available to immigrant and refugee-serving agencies, focusing on Customer Relationships Management (CRM), Case Management, Non-profit Software, Database Information Management Systems (DIMS), and Digital Business Platforms. The key functionality connecting the systems is that they each provide "a central database with a 360-degree view for every client interaction and serve to ease collaboration, streamline operations, and enable performance reporting." For this report they refer to all systems as CRM throughout the report.
What do you need to know?
Researchers looked at technology solutions (without making specific recommendations or endorsements). They also outline where this work fits into IRCC and the sector's digital mandate and future. They acknowledge that IRCC has embarked on a digitization process which will have an impact, and opportunities for the sector. According to the researchers: "By seeking to modernize processes using technology, IRCC and associated immigration agencies are in a stronger position to accommodate even more foreign nationals once the pandemic is over. To that end, AAISA's members seek to leverage a CRM system to address these modernization results as well as meet its own goals and objectives.
What did the researchers do?
A 26-question survey was sent in both official languages to IRCC funded settlement provider organizations in BC. They also conducted several, individual 90-minute exploratory interview consultations with contributors who volunteered to delve deeper into their client management solution experiences.
What did the researchers find?
They identified and created profiles of 15 CRM solutions currently in use in the sector. Four of these systems were custom developed from scratch by sector agencies. Each profile comes with a matrix of key functionality relevant to how it would be used by a sector agency.
Notably, two current built-by-the sector CRM solutions do not appear to be mentioned in this report. Both are IRCC funded and should be added to the analysis (both use Salesforce as their base, and Salesforce is analyzed in the report, but not in the context of how it's used in the sector):
How can you use this research?
Importantly, the report provides a "Next Steps" section which outlines how important the role of non-techie agency staff are in the creation/selection, customization, and roll out of CRM systems in the agency setting. Researchers provide high level recommendations as well as typical selection and implementation steps and considerations. If you are embarking on a CRM selection or creation process, this report is essential reading to help you in that process.
Downloads:
This paper outlines places where technology can provide or is providing innovative approaches in the skills and employment ecosystem. It also details the ways in which technology can address the skills gap, including its potential for enhancing skills development and helping organizations improve and adapt.
Introduction
"Much has been written about the impact of disruptive technology on the future of work, most of it focusing on the jobs that will be changed, replaced and created and the extent to which supply and demand will be altered. But technology-driven innovation also has the potential to address aspects of the so-called skills gap. There are opportunities to harness the power of data analytics, artificial intelligence, mobile communications and virtual and augmented reality to assess skills, develop skills, better align supply and demand and create more inclusive, productive and healthy workplaces. There are many new and emerging models of learning and training that improve access, diversity and the quality of skills development and training as well as the practices of employers. While not all innovations in skills development and training are dependent on technology, this paper will outline places where technology can or is providing innovative approaches in the skills/employment ecosystem.
This paper reviews some of the research examining the potential of technology to address the skills gap, including its potential for enhancing skills development and also building the capacity of organizations to adapt to change. Illustrated with real world examples from across sectors and around the world, this paper also reviews how technology is being used to improve access, and diversity and workplace inclusivity amongst equity-seeking groups.
Increasingly organizations are turning to tools to assist in creating more inclusive workplaces. Systems such as Diversio enable people to assess their own practices and access leading ones. Technologies are also being used within organizations to provide support for employee health and well-being based on the notion that happy employees are productive employees and that the costs of turnover are high. Tools that regularly assess employee effectiveness for example are emerging as alternatives to annual employee engagement surveys, allowing granular analysis of challenges and interventions. Additionally, there are a host of assistive technologies and nudge tools aimed at providing employees with accommodations and support.
The preliminary portion of the paper will proceed as follows:
[pdf-embedder url="https://km4s.ca/wp-content/uploads/Technology-Enabled-Innovations-in-the-Skills-and-Employment-Ecosystem-2020.pdf" title="Technology-Enabled Innovations in the Skills and Employment Ecosystem (2020)"]
Abstract
"Widespread concerns about new technologies—whether they be novels, radios, or smartphones—are repeatedly found throughout history. Although tales of past panics are often met with amusement today, current concerns routinely engender large research investments and policy debate. What we learn from studying past technological panics, however, is that these investments are often inefficient and ineffective.
What causes technological panics to repeatedly reincarnate?
And why does research routinely fail to address them?
To answer such questions, I examined the network of political, population, and academic factors driving the Sisyphean cycle of technology panics. In this cycle, psychologists are encouraged to spend time investigating new technologies, and how they affect children and young people, to calm a worried population. Their endeavor, however, is rendered ineffective because of the lack of a theoretical baseline; researchers cannot build on what has been learned researching past technologies of concern. Thus, academic study seemingly restarts for each new technology of interest, which slows down the policy interventions necessary to ensure technologies are benefiting society. In this article, I highlight how the Sisyphean cycle of technology panics stymies psychology’s positive role in steering technological change and the pervasive need for improved research and policy approaches to new technologies."
Conclusion
"Digital technologies are presently shaping and reshaping people’s lives and how they live them; their power to do so will likely increase in the foreseeable future. High-quality scientific evidence considered within a broader historic context is needed to understand how these changes will affect people and society. It will help ensure stakeholders, such as governments, regulators, designers, programmers, parents, and digital technology users, are equipped with the tools and information necessary to make informed decisions in caregiving, policy, and personal arenas.
With that understood, there is little reason to assume future research investigating new technologies will escape the Sisyphean cycle of technology panics without a substantial shift in conceptual and empirical approach. The lack of a linear approach in this research area—created on the basis of a societal problem, not a scientific theory—means that panics are reincarnated for every new technology that becomes popular in society. Scientific progress is slow, and the research output produced is routinely conflicting and intensely wasteful. This stymies actionable science communication and policymaking. Furthermore, technology quickly embeds itself in society, which makes it difficult to change or adapt, meaning that evidence provision needs to be as fast as possible. It is apparent from examining past technology panics that research in the area routinely fails to efficiently deliver answers to important and divisive research questions.
Being realistic, there is little impetus for the field to reflect about its own methodology and its place in the network of political, academic, and public spheres that drive this inefficient cycle. To ensure that psychology does not become an accomplice to a never-ending Sisyphean cycle of technology panics, the research area has to acknowledge the need for radical change. Psychologists need to recognize the increasingly prominent role they play in facilitating cycles of technology panics and consider whether what they are doing is bringing a net benefit to society and academia. Psychological scientists need to encourage debate about how policy can be built in a time of accelerating technological change but slow research progress. Furthermore, research practices should be adapted so that the research process does not restart when a new technology gets introduced and that evidence is provided quickly. Reflecting, discussing, and adapting the field to address the Sisyphean cycle of technology panics can ultimately empower psychology to steer predictable public concerns about emergent technologies into a more productive and efficient future."[pdf-embedder url="https://km4s.ca/wp-content/uploads/The-Sisyphean-Cycle-of-Technology-Panics-2020.pdf" title="The Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics (2020)"]
Abstract
“This paper addresses the role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in migration governance, support, and experience with particular attention to emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, social media, and virtual reality. We propose a framework for technology use based on user groups and process types. We provide examples of using emerging technologies for migration-related tasks within the context of this framework. We then identify how such technologies can be applied to migration-related tasks, developed for customized use, and improved through research to add new features that can help different migration stakeholders. We suggest a series of possible directions for future research and development to take advantage of specific affordances of those emerging technologies more effectively.”
The authors introduce "the Migration-Technology Matrix (MTM) as a framework tomap out possible links between migration-related user groups (macro, meso, and micro) and technical processes (data collection, creation, analysis, visualization, and interpretation)." They "review a series of typical cases that used different ICT tools to perform those common tasks, and identify the gaps in terms of application, customization, and research opportunities."
According to the authors "The Migration-Technology Matrix (MTM) allows us to see technology-migration connections in terms of three levels of migration-related stakeholders and five main information processing types. As demonstrated in previous section, despite the increasing use of ICT by different migration stakeholders, the emerging technologies and their affordances have not been effectively used in this area."
They also "topics that have received very little research attention within the migration context. The issues of trust (for example, who is a trustworthy source for migrants) and privacy (how to protect protect migrant's personal information while collecting useful data) still include many unknowns, and the procedures involved in data collection and communication have to be studied with regards to these issues. There is almost no ICT support for data interpretation or migrants' well-being. Intelligent methods have been used (Puiu et al., 2016; Roda et al., 2016) to help make sense of large amounts of data, but (1) they have not been investigated for migration data, and (2) they have not been developed for individual migrants who have to struggle with the information they receive. Last but not least, personalization and contextualization can be helpful in such cases
as used in many intelligent systems recommending products and services to users (Aggarwal, 2016). A common trend in recommender and search systems these days is to provide recommendations (or search results) that are customized to the needs and interests of specific user or conditions of a specific context. Providing migration-related services to users at any of the here levels and based on the notions of personalization and contextualization is an open area of research."
[pdf-embedder url="https://km4s.ca/wp-content/uploads/Information-and-Communication-Technology-in-Migration-A-Framework-for-Applications-Customization-and-Research-2022.pdf" title="Information and Communication Technology in Migration - A Framework for Applications, Customization, and Research (2022)"]
"Over the past decade there has been a rising sense of technological anxiety -- are we headed toward a tech future we don’t want?
There is a palpable sense that the tools that we have developed to improve our lives are not serving us well, and may be making things worse—a sense that if we don’t reassess and recalibrate, we could cause even more harm. Many of us feel that social media divides and polarizes us. We worry that our devices and screens breed addiction, depression, and otherwise damage our mental health. We’re anxious about how our data is being gathered, monetized, sold, and possibly used against us in ways that we are only beginning to fathom. We fear that artificial intelligence (AI) tools we are building are reproducing and even augmenting societal biases in their black box decision making. We know that AI has already begun replacing jobs and worry that ours may be next.
The pandemic has surfaced both the problems and the immense potential of technology as a source of community and knowledge sharing. After almost two years into a global pandemic, the risks and benefits of technology appear to be even more unevenly distributed across social groups and geographies. Our inability to agree on a coordinated and reasonable response has spotlighted the extent to which we need to improve trust in information, institutions, and each other. The importance of aligning our technology with public interest has become more pronounced—even as we're just realizing what "aligning technology with the public interest" truly means.
It’s Time for Action
The issues we face around tech and society (misinformation, AI ethics, algorithmic bias, hate speech, facial recognition, to name just a few) are complex. They require us to not only consider the ethical and societal ramifications of the technology that we build, but to also surface potential unintended consequences, negative externalities, and impacts across a variety of communities. They also require continuous stewardship, with monitoring, assessment, and accountability mechanisms."
Organizations are springing up around the world to investigate these concerns, to articulate the problems, and to come up with solutions. Popular documentaries like Coded Bias and The Social Dilemma are surfacing the conversation, and inspiring new voices to enter the ecosystem. Governments and policymakers are becoming involved in the form of guidelines and regulations, and tech companies are being held accountable by their customers and employees.
And so the field of “Responsible Technology” has emerged, benefiting from the convergence of various movements—including ethical tech, responsible innovation, responsible AI, trust & safety, digital citizenship, and tech for good. The Responsible Tech ecosystem is fed by an underlying knowledge base of researchers, academics, and advocates who have done decades worth of foundational work. Together, we are all motivated by a common goal: to co-create a better tech future that is aligned with the public interest."
[pdf-embedder url="https://km4s.ca/wp-content/uploads/Responsible-Tech-Guide-How-to-Get-Involved-Build-a-Better-Tech-Future-2021.pdf" title="Responsible-Tech-Guide-How-to-Get-Involved-Build-a-Better-Tech-Future (2021)"]
As a companion piece to the UN Special Rapporteur’s report on racism, technology, and borders, the Refugee Law Lab and EDRi (European Digital Rights) published a report based on over 40 interviews with refugees and people on the move, exploring the systemic factors that create migration management experiments at and around the border.
"This report offers the beginning of a systemic analysis of migration management technologies, foregrounding the experiences of people on the move who are interacting with and thinking about surveillance, biometrics, and automated decision-making during the course of their migration journeys. Our reflections highlight the need to recognise how uses of migration management technology perpetuate harms, exacerbate systemic discrimination and render certain communities as technological testing grounds...
This report first presents recommendations for policy makers, governments, and the private sector on the use of migration management technologies, foregrounding the need to focus on the harmful impacts of these interventions and abolish the use of high risk applications. We then provide a brief snapshot of the ecosystem of migration management technologies, highlighting various uses before, at, and beyond the border and analysing their impacts on people’s fundamental human rights. The report concludes with reflections on why and how states are able to justify these problematic uses of technologies, exacerbating and creating new barriers to access to justice through the allure of technosolutionism, the criminalization of migration, and border externalization—all occuring in an environment of dangerous narratives stoking antimigrant sentiments. Technology replicates power relations in society that render certain communities as testing grounds for innovation. These experiments have very real impacts on people’s rights and lives."
Watch this presentation about the report findings and recommendations by Petra Molnar:
Introduction
"States are increasingly turning to novel techniques to ‘manage’ migration. Across the globe, an unprecedented number of people are on the move due to conflict, instability, environmental factors, and economic reasons. As a response to increased migration into the European Union over the last few years, many states and international organizations involved in migration management are exploring technological experiments in various domains such as border enforcement, decision-making, and data mining. These experiments range from Big Data predictions about population movements in the Mediterranean and Aegean seas to automated decision-making in immigration applications to Artificial Intelligence (AI) lie detectors and risk-scoring at European borders. These innovations are often justified under the guise of needing new tools to ‘manage’ migration in novel ways. However, often these technological experiments do not consider the profound human rights ramifications and real impacts on human lives.
Now, as governments move toward biosurveillance6 to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are seeing an increase in tracking projects and automated drones. If previous use of technology is any indication, refugees and people crossing borders will be disproportionately targeted and negatively affected. Proposed tools such as virus-targeting robots,8 cellphone tracking, and AI-based thermal cameras can all be used against people crossing borders, with far-reaching human rights impacts. In addition to violating the rights of the people subject to these technological experiments, the interventions themselves do not live up to the promises and arguments used to justify these innovations. This use of technology to manage and control migration is also shielded from scrutiny because of its emergency nature. In addition, the basic protections that exist for more politically powerful groups that have access to mechanisms of redress and oversight are often not available to people crossing borders. The current global digital rights space also does not sufficiently engage with migration issues, at best only tokenizing the involvement from both migrants and groups working with this community.
Technology and migration are at the forefront of European policy development. For example, on September 23rd 2020, the European Commission published its long-awaited “Pact on Migration and Asylum,” along with a host of legislative proposals, guidance and other texts. This Pact explicitly mentions a study “on the technical feasibility of adding a facial recognition software...for the purposes of comparing facial images, including of minors”12 to eu-LISA (or The European Union Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice). The pact also broadens border screening and increases immigration detention capabilities;13 includes a proposed “pre-entry” screening process with biometric data, security, health, and vulnerability checks; expands the EURODAC database for the comparison of biometric data; and strengthens the mandate of FRONTEX, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency. More broadly, this year’s EU White Paper on Artificial Intelligence and accompanying documents insufficiently engaged with the specific context of migration management technologies, relying on overly broad categories of “high risk” applications without analysis of how AI-type technologies impinge on people’s human rights in the migration context.
Ultimately, the primary purpose of the technologies used in migration management is to track, identify, and control those crossing borders. The issues around emerging technologies in the management of migration are not just about the inherent use of technology but rather about how it is used and by whom, with states and private actors setting the stage for what is possible and which priorities matter. The data gathering inherent in the development of these technologies also includes the expansion of existing mass-scale databases that underpin these practices to sensitive data, especially biometrics. The implementation of an EU-wide overarching interoperable smart border management system is also imminent in the coming years.A Such data and technology systems provide an enabling infrastructure for many automated decision-making projects with potentially harmful implications. The development and deployment of migration management is ultimately about decision-making by powerful actors on communities with few resources and mechanisms of redress.
Politics also cannot be discounted, as migration management is inherently a political exercise. Migration data has long being politicised by states to justify greater interventions in support of threatened national sovereignty and to bolster xenophobic and antimigrant narratives. The state’s ultimate power to decide who is allowed to enter and under what conditions is strengthened by ongoing beliefs in technological impartiality.
The unequal distribution of benefits from technological development privileges the private sector as the primary actor in charge of development, with states and governments wishing to control the flows of migrant populations benefiting from these technological experiments. Governments and large organizations are the primary agents who benefit from data collection and affected groups remain the subject, relegated to the margins. It is therefore not surprising that the regulatory and legal space around the use of these technologies remains murky and underdeveloped, full of discretionary decision-making, privatized development, and uncertain legal ramifications.
These power and knowledge monopolies are allowed to exist because there is no unified global regulatory regime governing the use of new technologies, creating laboratories for high risk experiments with profound impacts on people’s lives. This type of experimentation also foregrounds certain framings over others that prioritize certain types of interventions (ie ‘catching liars at the border’ vs ‘catching racist border guards’). Why is it a more urgent priority to deport people faster rather than use technological interventions to catch mistakes that are made in improperly refused immigration and refugee applications?
The so-called AI divide—or the gap between those who are able to design AI and those who are subject to it—is broadening and highlights problematic power dynamics in participation and agency when it comes to the roll out of new technologies. Who gets to participate in conversations around proposed interventions? Which communities become guineapigs for testing new initiatives? Why does so little oversight and accountability exist in this opaque space of high stakes and high risk decision-making?
The human rights impacts of these state and private sector practices is a useful lens through which to examine these technological experiments, particularly in times of greater border control security and screening measures, complex systems of global migration management, the increasingly widespread criminalization of migration, and rising xenophobia. States have clear domestic and international legal obligations to respect and protect human rights when it comes to the use of these technologies and it is incumbent upon policy makers, government officials, technologists, engineers, lawyers, civil society, and academia to take a broad and critical
look at the very real impacts of these technologies on human lives.
Unfortunately, the viewpoints of those most affected are routinely excluded from the discussion, particularly around areas of no-go-zones or ethically fraught usages of technology. There is a lack of contextual analysis when thinking through the impact of new technologies resulting in great ethical, social, political, and personal harm."
[pdf-embedder url="https://km4s.ca/wp-content/uploads/Technological-Testing-Grounds-2020.pdf" title="Technological-Testing-Grounds (2020)"]
“The survey provides insights into the experience and reflections of managers in Ontario settlement agencies beyond the first wave of the pandemic. Gaining insight into the agencies’ experiences is critical to agencies themselves, and policymakers at all levels of government. The assessment of the health and capacities of the sector’s agencies is invaluable. Overall, the data reveal highly resilient settlement agencies that have adapted continuously to serve migrants despite the stress of a global pandemic. The data will be analysed in detail in subsequent reports.
This technical report documents the responses to a survey of managers from member agencies of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI) conducted between November 26 and December 23, 2021. A separate survey of frontline workers has its own report. The survey was undertaken in collaboration with OCASI by the Building Migrant Resilience in Cities / Immigration et résilience en milieu urbain (BMRC-IRMU), a SSHRC-funded partnership. A Settlement Services Working Group of community-based and academic members from BMRCIRMU helped to guide the research. The survey instrument was approved by the Human Participants Review Committee at York University. From the perspective of managers from OCASI member agencies, the survey investigates the impacts of COVID-19 on agency activities and other dimensions of agency operations during the twelve-month period following the pandemic’s first wave. Many questions parallel questions from a survey conducted by OCASI that focused on the first wave of the pandemic.
The web-based survey was sent to all OCASI member agencies with a request that one senior member of management complete it. The majority of surveys were completed by the Executive Director or Associate Executive Director. Available in English and French, with Francophone agencies receiving the French version, we only report the English responses that make up the vast majority of completed surveys. The number of completed responses in English varied from question to question with a maximum of 49. The response rate is satisfactory, especially given the challenges of conducting surveys during a pandemic.
The report is descriptive, presenting the frequencies of responses for each question and a brief summary of the main responses for each question. The questions focus on four topics:
[pdf-embedder url="https://km4s.ca/wp-content/uploads/Pandemic-Response-Survey-Results-OCASI-Agency-Management-2022.pdf" title="Pandemic Response Survey Results - OCASI Agency Management (2022)"]
May 5th webinar:
Presentation Slides from May 5 event:
[pdf-embedder url="https://km4s.ca/wp-content/uploads/BMRC-May-5-OCASI-Survey-2022-2.pdf"]
“The survey provides insights into the experiences and reflections of frontline settlement workers in Ontario beyond the first wave of the pandemic that are critical to the sector itself and policymakers from all levels of government who are concerned with the integration of migrants. The assessment of the health and capacities of the sector’s workforce and the organizations themselves is invaluable. Overall, the data reveal a highly resilient sector that has adapted continuously and quite successfully to support the settlement and integration of migrants during an unprecedented global pandemic. The data will be analysed in detail in subsequent reports.
This technical report documents the responses to a survey of paid frontline staff from member agencies of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI) conducted between November 26 and December 23, 2021. A separate survey of managers has a separate report. The survey was undertaken in collaboration with OCASI by the Building Migrant Resilience in Cities/ Immigration et résilience en milieu urbain (BMRC-IRMU), a SSHRC-funded partnership. A Settlement Services Working Group of community-based and academic members from BMRC-IRMU helped to guide the research. The survey instrument was approved by the Human Participants Review Committee at York University. From the perspective of frontline workers, the survey investigates the impacts of COVID- 19 on workers, clients, and Ontario agencies in the twelve-month period following the pandemic’s first wave. Many questions parallel questions from an earlier survey conducted by OCASI focused on the first wave of the pandemic.
This web-based survey was distributed to OCASI member agencies and they were asked to send the survey to frontline staff with a request for them to complete the survey. The survey was available in English and French. We only report the English responses that make up the vast majority of completed surveys. The number of completed responses in English varied from question to question with a maximum of 170. The response rate is satisfactory, especially given the challenges of conducting survey-based work during a pandemic.
The report is descriptive. It presents the frequencies of responses for each question and a brief summary of the responses for each question. The questions focus on [four] topics:
[pdf-embedder url="https://km4s.ca/wp-content/uploads/Pandemic-Response-Survey-Results-OCASI-Agency-Frontline-Workers-2022.pdf" title="Pandemic Response Survey Results - OCASI Agency Frontline Workers (2022)"]
May 5th webinar:
May 5th presentation slides
[pdf-embedder url="https://km4s.ca/wp-content/uploads/BMRC-May-5-OCASI-Survey-2022-2.pdf"]
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