The intent of this report is to provide a strategy for a brighter future for the sector - a Settlement 2.0 - one that prioritizes empowering newcomers to be agents in their own settlement journey and which builds the overall capacity of the sector to embrace innovative mindsets and more sustainably support newcomers over time. The Settlement 2.0 Project strives to understand the pre-conditions necessary for effective change, and how the sector can embrace tech and innovation in service delivery and strategic principles.
Background
The Settlement 2.0 project consisted of two phases:
Phase 1 involved the undertaking of a situational analysis of the settlement sector across Canada, which explored the effectiveness of current service delivery models and challenges to open and collaborative innovation in the settlement sector.
Phase 2 built on the findings of the phase one situational analysis to design and convene community consultations between stakeholders in the settlement sector across British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, with the goal of collecting data on how effective collaboration and promotion of innovative responses could address challenges identified in the previous phase.
What the first and second stages of the Settlement 2.0 Project accomplished can be summarized as follows: the Situational Analysis provided a national “lay of the land” to help PeaceGeeks understand the state of technology, innovation and open practices in the settlement sector across Canada. The Community Consultations held across the Lower Mainland of British Columbia bolstered the national findings and offered local examples of how innovative and collaborative practices are being implemented at the community, municipal, and regional levels. Further, the Community Consultations identified specific preconditions necessary for the settlement sector to more widely and comprehensively embrace innovation and collaboration in the future.
This final third report takes the national and local findings and presents them together to demonstrate:
The latter examples provide food for thought for IRCC to consider how to support the national settlement sector in moving toward more innovative and collaborative practices as a whole, thus bringing all phases of the Settlement 2.0 project to key focus points that can be carried forward into further conversations with more of the settlement community as IRCC moves toward a Settlement 2.0.
Recommendations
The resulting recommendations detailed in the body of this report are carefully linked to IRCC’s “CORE” Principles, as they were formally implemented into IRCC’s 2019 five-year Calls for Proposals. These CORE Principles align with the 12 Core Values of Settlement Work identified 20 years ago by the sector itself (CCR 2000).1 Language used to describe innovation (both in describing IRCC’s CORE Principles and by civic tech and other innovation actors), such as client-centric, co-creation, openness, transparency, empowering communities, addressing vulnerability, and knowledge sharing is directly connected to the immigrant and refugee-serving sector’s principles in approaches to service provision, program development, and system change. The sector’s innovation foundation is already in place.
The authors provide actionable, scalable, stakeholder-developed recommendations to IRCC and other relevant settlement stakeholders, to build on this foundation, facilitate widespread collaboration and innovative practices and technologies in the sector, to better serve newcomers now and in the future.
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