Promising Practices and Toolkits > Working Women Community Centre
The mission of Working Women Community Centre (WWCC) is to work with immigrant women and their families to improve the quality of their lives through self-development and community action. As an agency working with newcomers and immigrants for over 30 years, their services and programs include:
- Immigrant settlement
- language and training
- employment
- public education
- volunteer development
- health and wellness
- outreach to isolated and vulnerable communities
- community development and capacity building
- promoting social inclusion for newcomers and immigrants
View a more complete profile of Working Women Community Centre.
The Ambassador Project
Working Women Community Centre has a broad and diverse history and experience of working with newcomers and immigrants in volunteer programs and initiatives. Many of their programs are volunteer run, and volunteers are active in all facets of the organization. In particular, their experience working with the local community in the Don Mills Sheppard area led them to develop the Ambassador Project.
The Ambassador Project has been an extremely successful, community-driven project that has engaged newcomers and immigrants in conducting outreach to isolated and vulnerable members of their own, and other communities. It allowed newcomers and immigrants in the neighbourhood to play a key role in outreach and referral to settlement services as well as their engagement in community participation and engagement.
Through its partnership with OCASI, WWCC is sharing their experience and learnings from the design, development, implementation and outcomes of the Ambassador Project. The objective includes educating other agencies about how to work with this model.
With this purpose, WWCC has:
- Produced a comprehensive training manual for agencies seeking to train newcomers and immigrants to conduct outreach within their own, and other communities.
- Developed specific materials for a training session for organizations who would benefit from learning about how to conduct outreach with newcomer communities by taking an asset based, community development approach. The session will be presented at the OCASI Professional Development Conference, May 2008.
As part of the partnership, WWCC has also developed and implement an information session to clients of agencies in the settlement sector focusing on creative ways to volunteer and outreach within their own, and other immigrant communities
If you are interested in participating or sponsoring any of these training activities, please contact Paulina Maciulis at the OCASI office, pmaciulis@ocasi.org. To access the Training Manual contact Luanne Rayvals at lrayvals@workingwomencc.org
Overview of the Ambassador Project
The Ambassador Project ran from January to December 2006, including start up, implementation and evaluation.
The Ambassador Project was designed to train twelve volunteers to provide information to link newcomer & immigrant women and their families to existing services. The focus was on reaching clients with little or no experience with the social service sector in Toronto. Volunteer Ambassadors created a visible presence in their communities wearing bright T-shirts and identification and will handed out simple flyers (also in relevant languages) with basic referral information to potential clients. Ambassadors scheduled times in key access points in their neighbourhoods such as apartment lobbies, malls, popular hang-outs, Laundromats, grocery stores, etc. to talk with neighbours, friends and family members about available services. Our goals were to outreach to at least 960 potential clients, reach at least 300 members of our target group and to effectively refer at least 80 new clients to existing services.
The project objectives were to:
- Train 12 volunteers from the target community in outreach techniques and engage them in creating their own individual and group work plans in order to meet project goals and outcomes
- Create 2 groups of volunteers from linguistically specific groups (Chinese & Farsi)
- Conduct two- three hour “patrols” in the local communities each month per team for a period of 7 months for a total of 14 patrols per team. For the seven month outreach period, this will produce an output of 28 patrols x 2 hours each, which is a total of 56 direct outreach hours delivered by the volunteer teams
- Create at least 36 new links between informal networks and the social service network through the volunteer’s personal outreach work plans
- Distribute at least 1200 flyers to target communities over a seven month period
- Provide information to the target community in a clear, accessible and positive way in a safe and welcoming environment
- Reach at least three hundred members of our target group
- Result in at least 100 new clients successfully referred to existing services (by successful we mean that the client receives service that is appropriate to their stated need).
- Outreach teams will have the option to take groups of people to services (e.g., Chinese Seniors) in order to introduce them to the Language Assessment Centre, LINC classes, counselling, groups, etc. These groups will be coordinated in conjunction with project staff who will oversee all aspects of these trips, and who will be responsible for distributing resources required. We anticipate that we may conduct up to five such trips with up to six new clients per trip over the life of the project on an as-needed basis. These trips will be included in the overall client referral statistics.
- Create a heightened visibility and credibility for access to existing services with previously isolated individuals/communities.
The Ambassador Project exceeded the stated outcomes of the project, and built a skills and knowledge base in the community through client leadership initiative. Working Women Community Centre is now ready to share with other interested communities the learning and resources from the project.