Building a warmer welcome for newcomers

The Hamilton Immigration Partnership Council has an ambitious list of goals for 2020

A local body formed by the federal government to lead newcomer integration has devised a plan to make Hamilton more welcoming for immigrants and refugees.

The Hamilton Immigration Partnership Council (HIPC), mandated to co-ordinate settlement agencies, has an ambitious strategy that by 2020 includes:

a campaign to counter negative immigrant stereotypes; a yearly Newcomer Day; a mobile settlement information hub; an annual conference; an updated immigration profile of the city;

university research on Syrian integration into labour market;

The nine projects — some modelled on partnership councils the government set up in other Canadian cities — are in the formative stages, says HIPC project manager Nicole Longstaff.

“It’s now a question of who has the time, who will contribute — workwise and funding.”

The counter-stereotype campaign — under hashtag #HamiltonforAll — will recruit newcomers to tell their stories in bus shelter ads or on social media, Longstaff said. The Newcomer Day will be similar to Toronto’s.

HIPC is key to helping agencies be proactive rather than reactive because it looks at the big picture to make Hamilton a welcoming and safe place for newcomers, says Lily

Lumsden, the local YMCA’s manager of employment and immigrant services.

“Without it, we would be scrambling to put out fires all the time,” Lumsden said. “With HIPC, we’re able to plan on a consistent basis … It really does take a village to help integrate and settle newcomers.”

The YWCA services help a few thousand newcomers a year by providing settlement workers in schools, English language assessments and two information centres each for adults and youth.

HIPC, which was formed in 2009, started taking action in 2011, the same year Hamilton’s SISO (Settlement and Integration Services Organization) closed. (It went bankrupt after defrauding $1 million in federal funding.)

“We really needed to figure out what everyone was doing,” Lumsden said. HIPC re-examined its priorities two years ago and now takes a more focused approach.

Former HIPC chair Judy Travis says the government has created a competitive model among agencies and HIPC is supposed to help them work better together. “It’s about not working in silos.” Travis noted Hamilton received 1,400 government or privately sponsored refugees last year — when it normally gets about 250.

“Many (Syrian refugees) came with large families and had low language skills or were illiterate in their own language, which is somewhat unprecedented,” she said about meeting their needs.

Travis says HIPC has three priorities:

co-ordinate services that are constantly changing and in flux, depending on the wave of immigration and refugees of the day;

research and understand the latest newcomers;

eliminate community fear of immigrants and refugees.

“HIPC is there to try to smooth out the bumps,” she says.