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Yesterday I co-presented with Jennifer Chan from the Department of Imaginary Affairs at the The Regional Diversity Roundtable's conference Centering Diversity for Workplace Equity: Imagining Collective Futures. Our focus was on valuing and centering equity in digital transformation. We had a rich, nuanced, and interesting discussion with participants and I wanted to share my part of the presentation here.

Recently, AlphPlus has gone through a similar process of looking into the future of hybrid and digital service delivery in Ontario's Literacy and Basic Skills sector. It is worth highlighting their consultation and final reports. What aligns as well as differs with findings in our sector should be of interest to review.

This report uses recommendations highlighted during the past two years to lay the groundwork for the sector to reimagine how services are designed and delivered in order to increase sector efficiency, capacity, flexibility and service delivery.

IRCC recently funded a number of projects under their Service Delivery Improvements (SDI) funding, but hasn't released funding information yet. So I sifted through the Government of Canada's Proactive Disclosure site and found some info.

Settlement agencies still have work to do to ensure they’re offering enough online services to newcomers, including using online channels to communicate with them before they arrive in Canada.

In the Settlement Sector and Technology Task Group report we made a recommendation that I want to focus on. In part because during a recent project it became clear just how important this recommendation will be to the future of digital transformation in the Immigrant and Refugee-serving sector.

In this 2022 Pre-Arrival Virtual Conference follow-up I wanted to be a bit more practical. Still future focused, but perhaps more narrowly now. The practical future window I’m focused on today is about 2 years. From now until the next national Call for Proposals. Still looking at what our sector can aspire to. But more practical.

When we’re looking at future proofing settlement work, I like to think about it as a bit of an iceberg. There is a great deal below the surface that has to be in place before what we see above the surface is effective. The future of settlement work is about much more than technology but I want to focus this iceberg conversation on technology since that’s what we’re focused on here. 

We have an opportunity to rethink how we create events and learning experiences moving forward. Simply jumping back into the way we always did things is not the way to do it.