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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.

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.

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.

The articles in this series should provide you with some inspiration and ideas. You should want to learn more about the projects and research. Hopefully they will encourage you to share what you’re working on. There is so much innovation in our sector. Too much of it stays under the radar. With this publication, we’re looking to reveal some of the innovation to you. Let’s make this a starting point for an ongoing sector conversation.

I’m always inspired when I chat with folks in the sector, but this Metropolis Conference session reminded me of the incredible wisdom, knowledge, and passion that exists if we just ask! I'm sharing what we did and what we learned here to try to keep the conversation going.

This article is my presentation for Wellesley Institute's Community Knowledge Program webinar. Instead of slides, I've decided to take participants on a web journey through my Knowledge Mobilization approach.