About this Site

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Purpose

Settlement.Org At Work is a professional development web site for those working with newcomers to Ontario.

This is not the web site that you will refer to for immediate resources when you are sitting with your client. This is the web site you will have consulted before you meet with your client to understand how to best serve them.

Background

Settlement.Org at Work is a portal to professional development information for frontline workers and managers of immigrant-serving organizations. Our goal is to help you do your job better.

It focuses on the information and resources you need to do two things:

  1. Assisting Clients - serve your clients with the most up to date skills and techniques available, including counselling, serving specific communities, information and referral and more.

  2. Assisting Staff - dealing with workplace issues, including conflict, stress, policies, human resource management. Access to funding and program-specific resources.

This resource is an attempt to describe the dimensions of settlement work and to provide tools that can be used to train workers to be effective settlement counsellors. It is a training guide, not a source of answers to all the challenging questions related to settlement counselling. The emphasis is on processes that trainers can use to initiate introspection and animate group discussion on these issues. For many of the questions there are no final answers, because of the complex nature of the settlement process and the cultural dimension of every issue. The assumption is that participants in this type of training, given stimulating activities, will come up with important insights from their own collective experiences.

It is also a professional development and lifelong learning guide. This site will constantly highlight new and innovative information and resources to help you do your work more effectively.

Many of the resources will come from the immigrant-serving sector itself; information you and your colleagues have created that all service providers will find useful. Many resources will highlight the best and most relevant resources from other service sectors. Our goal is to provide you with a portal to resources that you will find useful in your continuous learning and upgrading process.

The resources we highlight for you will meet certain criteria. They will:

  • improve the way information and services are provided to newcomers

  • strengthen the knowledge and expertise of agencies and individual workers and managers

  • increase the productivity of agencies and individual workers

  • enhance communication and collaboration within the sector

This site provides an electronic community where agencies and workers can post announcements, make contacts, discuss current issues or projects, find answers to frequently asked questions and access a database of online documents.

Acknowledgements

The site is managed by theOntario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI) and funded by Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Settlement and Port of Entry Directorate, Ontario Region.

We wish to thank the numerous organizations and individuals who made significant contributions and suggestions.

Contact / Outreach

If you have any general questions or comments please use the Feedback page.