Coding school Lighthouse Labs is teaching refugees and immigrants how to enter the tech industry.
Earlier this month, the Canadian government announced that it will increase the country’s intake of new immigrants. Aiming to admit 350,000 people per year by 2021, federal leaders are hoping international talent will help address a national skills shortage and help grow Canada’s economy.
Given the country’s rapidly expanding tech industry, the most indemand workers include software developers and computer programmers. But although many immigrants and refugees have worked in technology in their home country, it can be difficult for new arrivals to step into a new role in a local company. Often individuals have been taught to do their assignments in ways that differ from Canadian norms, and with many employers not having an intimate knowledge of foreign-university credentials, it can be tough to land a good role.
In 2016, Kate Armstrong, director of Emily Carr’s Living Labs, wanted to find a way to help refugees and new immigrants find jobs in Vancouver’s tech market. After gathering various industry individuals to help those who had just landed in Canada, she convinced some businesses to commit to hiring, funding, or teaching new arrivals. Then, after aligning with the Immigrant Services Society of B.C. (ISSOFBC), she reached out to people in local organizations to finalize her ambitions. One of them was Jeremy Shaki, cofounder and CEO of coding school Lighthouse Labs.
“The program is called Techstart,” he tells the Georgia Straight on the line from Toronto. “What it’s been trying to do is to help people who are specifically coming from abroad get into the technology industry and into jobs. The ISSOFBC covers 50 percent of the fees, and we offer scholarships worth the other 50 percent. We teach our students languages—javascript, Ruby, HTML, CSS, jquery, these kind of things. And we teach them how to work within a modern developer function. So the tools they need—github and Gitflow, the way they’re meant to collaborate on projects—they do it as if they were working as a developer in Canada.”
Despite successfully graduating a number of students from the program into Vancouver companies, however, Shaki is unsure whether the initiative will continue into the next year. He notes that ending it would be unfortunate, given the federal government’s increased targets for settling immigrants into tech jobs and the shortage of talent in the industry.
But although the future of Techstart might be up in the air, ISSOFBC and Lighthouse Labs have partnered on another initiative—one that Shaki believes is vital both for helping new arrivals to Canada and for changing the face of the sector. Named Techwomen, the part-time program taught at the school offers female immigrants and refugees the skills to break into the industry.
“I’m a believer that any underrepresented group needs to be as properly and equally represented in tech as they are in the world,” he says of the initiative’s importance. “In reality, tech is about finding solutions. If there’s only a certain group of people finding solutions, they’re only going to find solutions to their problems. There’s a basic practical aspect [to the need for inclusion], which is that jobs are going to change, and you don’t want one group to have all of those skills. But I think, from a philosophical aspect, if one group is not really capable to function with that technology, or understanding it, or are intimidated by it, or can’t build it in a way that works for them, they are going to struggle to keep up with the evolving world. That creates too big of a divide. And when there are huge socioeconomic divides, sometimes it’s too difficult to catch up.”
because he’s one of North America’s top fundraising experts—and people seek his guidance when giving money to registered charities and other nonprofit holiday season.
In a recent phone interview with the Georgia Straight, the lighthearted president of Harvey Mckinnon Associates recalled being approached by an “incredibly generous couple” who donate about $100,000 per year.
“They give to about 100 charities—and some of them significant sums, and others maybe $50 or $100,” Mckinnon said. “Their question is, should they narrow down the giving and focus on certain areas?”
He then cracked a joke about there being two kinds of donors: those who focus all their giving in one area and those who are more “promiscuous” with their charitable contributions and support many causes.
“I, as a lapsed Catholic, am in the latter category because there are lots of things I care about,” Mckinnon quipped.
He pointed out that people generally give because they’re good people, but they also get something back from this activity, even if that’s not their primary motivation. For example, they might feel good about supporting women escaping violence, or ensuring that everybody in the community has food, or taking steps to provide refugees with a safe place to live so they’re not constantly on the run from warlords.
He counsels prospective donors to think about their values as well as what moves them emotionally. He added that people should also draw on the prefrontal cortex of their brain and think logically about the most important topic to address. He acknowledged that, for some, that could be climate change.
“But then you get an appeal for, say, a homeless shelter,” Mckinnon said. “That may seem more immediate, more emotional. But in the overall scheme of things, giving to help the climate might help build a healthier society, which will have a positive impact on new jobs.”
This, in turn, could conceivably lead to employment for homeless people, he added.
Mckinnon worked for Oxfam Canada for 10 years before launching his company in 1989. He’s the author of four books, including the best-selling The Power of Giving: How Giving Back Enriches Us All, which was cowritten with Azim Jamal. It advanced the concept of “escalator giving”, which involves increasing the percentage of a person’s income devoted to charity every year.
“Azim had a friend in India who gave a copy to a friend of his,” Mckinnon said. “This friend’s parents both died within 15 days of each other and he was totally depressed.”
The man read the book and decided to build a pediatric hospital in his parents’ name.
Some registered charities promote positive ratings that they receive from an organization called Charity Intelligence Canada. On its website, CIC states that it rates charities by analyzing financial metrics, social results, and management. These ratings sometimes generate media attention, but Mckinnon is not a fan of this approach.
“They have an unsophisticated way of evaluating a charity,” he insisted. “It’s completely shallow.”
To illustrate his point, the veteran fundraiser said that an international development agency might only spend one percent of its revenues on administration, which would elicit a high rating. But if it’s not hiring staff in the country where the money is being distributed, there would be a higher risk of it being stolen.
Alternatively, Mckinnon emphasized, the charity could employ two people in that country to monitor where the funds are going. The administration costs might go up somewhat, but there would be a far lower chance of donations disappearing.
He also pointed out that charitable events might have higher administration costs as a percentage of overall revenues, but they can attract donors who make annual contributions. In his view, it’s unfair to criticize these events if they’re also helping to build community connections and educating the public.
“All good fundraising is built on longterm thinking,” Mckinnon said. “You could spend $100 to get a new monthly donor, and they only give $50 because there are only three months left in the year. But they give for 25 years.”
He revealed that when he was at Oxfam Canada, he once bought coffee for three journalists who were short of funds. Then he gave them three forms to make monthly donations to the organization.
“Two of them are still on the program,” Mckinnon said. “They’ve given over $20,000 since then.”
The obituary for Dan Sealey was heartbreaking. Described as a “brilliant, hilarious, happy kid”, he had a dream of becoming a physics teacher. But “mental health and addiction” struggles later in life led to his death from an accidental drug overdose. The Victoria man was only 23 years old, the stepson of Agriculture Minister Lana Popham.
These horror stories are occurring with shocking regularity in British Columbia. According to the most recent statistics from the B.C. Coroners Service, 128 people succumbed to illicit-drug overdoses in September. More than 100 a month is the new normal.
It’s a vexing challenge confounding the health-care system. Dr. Evan Wood, executive director of the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use (BCCSU), says a great deal more must be done nationally to promote awareness of evidence-based addiction care.
“The province still has a long way to go in terms of having a functioning system for substance-use care,” Wood told the Georgia Straight by phone. “That, in large part, is due to the lack of training for health-care providers.”
He credited Goldcorp Inc. for stepping up with a $3-million donation to the St. Paul’s Hospital Foundation and the UBC Division of AIDS that funded the BCCSU Addiction Medicine Fellowship. With this—and through the generosity of other donors aligned with the Vancouver Foundation—87 fellows have graduated through a one-year fellowship program. Beyond that, more than 300 trainees, mostly medical students, have also been trained in addiction medicine for shorter periods.
“We also host rural physicians and healthcare providers from other health authorities, coming and doing training,” Wood added. “It’s pretty impactful around the province.”
He said that, traditionally, addiction care was “an unwanted stepchild of the health-care system”, in part due to the stigma attached to people who use drugs. According to Wood, this societal stigma has also existed within health care because of a lack of adequately trained providers.
“Either people were turned away at the door at places like the emergency room or in healthcare providers’ offices,” he noted.
This, in turn, has manifested itself in poor care for people who’ve also been criminalized because of their disease. In recent years, he emphasized, the dedication of people keen to fight the stigma has been “slowly bringing” an impact to the health-care system. In particular, he cited people who use drugs, families who are affected by drug use, and people making efforts to improve recovery services.
“Historically, given the criminalization of people who use drugs, policymakers are making decisions that affect the lives of people that aren’t even in the room to share their stories,” Wood said. “So we really benefit from philanthropic support to be able to bring the voices of drug users forward as well.”
Recently, in its magazine, the Vancouver Foundation stated that it has made almost $2 million available to help deal with the opioid crisis. Some of this money has gone to help fund frontline agencies, clinical trials, and public engagement.
One of the first calls for foundations to get involved in this issue came back in 2012. Ann Barnum, senior program officer overseeing substance-use disorders for the Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati, wrote a commentary headlined “What Foundations Can Do to Fight the Opiate Epidemic”.
She noted that between 2003 and 2012, there were more overdose deaths involving opioid analgesics than heroin and cocaine combined.
“For every unintentional overdose death related to an opioid analgesic, nine persons are admitted for substance abuse treatment, 35 visit emergency departments, 161 report drug abuse or dependence, and 461 report nonmedical uses of opioid analgesics,” Barnum wrote.
She suggested that foundations can play a major role in supporting grassroots prevention efforts by funding drug take-back programs and funding unusedmedicine disposal units in hospitals and police stations. In addition, she pointed out that foundations can fund needle exchanges and community-based distribution of naloxone, which saves the lives of people who have overdosed.
“One of the most common health consequences of injection drug use is endocarditis, or inflammation of the inner lining of the heart chambers,” Barnum wrote. “One heart valve replacement costs at least $250,000, while an entire needle exchange program generally costs between $50,000 and $60,000 per year.”
Five years later, Alexa Eggleston of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and Tym Rourke of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation wrote an article calling for a national philanthropic agenda to combat addiction. They stated that “philanthropy stepped up” in response to the AIDS epidemic, leading to health-care innovations that gave people with HIV the potential to live a full life with what became a “chronic, manageable condition”.
“And that work paved the way for dramatic civil rights advances for people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered,” Eggleston and Rourke wrote. “We can do the same with addiction—but philanthropy must lean in further.”
Here in Vancouver, foundations are leaning in, with the St. Paul’s Hospital fundraising arm at the forefront. “In addition to [examining] the impact of things that has direct relevance for patient care, there’s also innovative research being done with a view to creating critical social change in this area,” Wood said.