By Kara Peters Unrau
Published in December 2017
The Working Centre’s Resource Centre at 58 Queen Street South in Kitchener is a hub of activity providing a welcoming place for people to meet, and to find support for employment, housing, finances, community involvement, and much more. Each day is another opportunity to welcome Newcomers to Canada. Resource Centre hosts greet people in English, Amharic, Arabic, Turkish, Armenian, Spanish, Urdu, Tagrinya, and French – extending hospitality in whichever common language they can find together. This often includes various attempts at a sign language, laughter and mutual listing of languages as all try to find a way to communicate together. We have found that the open structure of the Resource Centre increases our capacity to meet people wherever they are at. It is a journey that we are walking on together. We are grateful for the many volunteers in the community who continue to give of their time and of themselves to make this possible.
According to Immigration Waterloo Region in August 2017, approximately 1800 newcomers have come to Waterloo Region since November 2015. During this period, the Resource Centre has welcomed a large influx of Arabic-speaking Refugees from Syria and surrounding countries. Initially supporting Arabic-speaking newcomers was overwhelming and we had a lot to learn about how to build bridges between cultural expectations and the Canadian context. Community-based Arabic-speaking Transition Assistants have been an important component. These positions have been funded by the Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development to bridge the language gap to help prepare newcomers to search for paid employment.
Most important is a welcoming attitude with openness to each person who comes through the door. Through these efforts we learned about creative ways of offering hospitality, engaged the complexities of migration trauma, cross-cultural communication, and together built new complementary understandings of work and workplace culture.
We used our current Employment Ontario funded Employment Services as a base to create a focused approach to respond to this significant number of Arabic-speaking Newcomers. The people we were meeting emphasized that employment was often a vital aspect of the resettlement journey, to the point that learning English was a secondary concern. Although we often met entire households, initially it was primarily the men in the family who would request help in finding work. As families have settled we have also seen more women who are coming to ask for support.
We’ve cobbled together resources from different government programs and foundations, creatively weaving supports around the person as situations changed. Understanding Health & Safety in the workplace, finding a good fit for a job, preparing income tax, signing up for government benefits, aligning work income with Ontario Works benefits, finding housing when the need arose, problem-solving the multitude of issues that emerge over and over, linking and relinking people with Settlement Workers, helping professionals to build a plan to find work in their field, often just offering support as people tell their story and problem-solving solutions together.
We’ve watched young people bravely practice their language skills while volunteering at the Queen Street Commons Café, and then going off to work at a local café. We provided an interpreter for a group of 10 men for a week of training and potential employment with LiUNA to do construction and road work. We supported a group of high school students to access short-term work during a busy time at Pfennings Organic Farm in the summer, and helped another group of men to connect to Martin’s Apple Farm. We made a word list for a woman, employed to sort clothes for a local store, helping her build confidence with an eye to moving into customer service.
People are working in kitchens, in food service, in construction, in customer service, landscaping, sewing, cleaning – the list is endless. Significantly, we’ve helped a person at a time to find the kind of work they can do, that supports their families and helps them to settle in Canada.
From April 2016 to October 2017 we registered 264 people in our Arabic-speaking Employment Services project. Over 70% of the people supported are now employed, and 26% have returned to ESL classes to build their language skills before looking for work.
The work continues – about one third of the people we are currently supporting (over 110) have low language skills and low education – they are looking for general labouring jobs where they can practice their slowly growing English language skills.
Canada will continue to welcome refugees from around the world. The example of Syrian refugees has demonstrated that it takes a full community effort to create a welcoming environment to assist refugees who are almost always dealing with challenging settlement issues. This challenge will not go away. We need to continue to open up opportunities for labouring jobs that offer families hope that they can support themselves in Canada. This will continue to be an important part of settlement in Canada.
Meanwhile, we work with a person at a time, welcoming employers to partner with us in this work. We received a letter recently from a Canadian born man who wrote “We don’t know how you all do it …. But you are doing it to really help people like us …… Keep smiling.”
