Multi-stakeholder Partnerships Designed to Facilitate Immigrant Settlement and Integration in Canada
Recent research and practice indicate that multi-stakeholder partnerships can be effective in facilitating the settlement and integration of immigrants in Canada. These partnerships may include immigrant-serving agencies, mainstream agencies, researchers, government, and other organizations working together to leverage their knowledge, skills, and resources. Examples include Réseaux en immigration francophone, Local Immigration Partnerships, Immigrant Sector Councils, Immigrant Employment Councils, and Quebec regionalization measures (such as the Conférence régionale des élus which is being reworked), among others. These partnerships enable the development of strategic and operational plans to address the challenges and opportunities associated with promoting welcoming communities for immigrants, and play an important role in organizing institutions and groups to develop coordinated approaches for putting immigrant settlement and integration onto the agenda of the broader community. They also afford an opportunity for multi-level collaborative governance, often involving cooperation among federal, provincial, and municipal governments. Though there is evidence of the effectiveness of these multi-stakeholder partnerships, there is less evidence on how best to build, operationalize, and govern these partnerships. Given the success of many of these partnerships, this knowledge is available, to some extent tacitly, but it would be useful to analyze, structure and articulate the information so that there is a sharing of knowledge and so that new partnerships can learn from the experiences of others.
Within this theme, topics to be addressed include:
- Key aspects of promising practices for building, operationalizing, and maintaining effective partnerships, including governance, management, communication, engagement, decision-making, and mobilization
- Key areas of potential synergy among mainstream and immigrant-serving institutions
- How to maintain participation and continued action over the long term, including gradual expansion
- Barriers and constraints to building and maintaining effective partnerships
- How these partnerships can contribute to improved immigrant outcomes
- How to measure the contributions of these partnerships to positive immigrant outcomes
- The role of evaluation and agreed target outputs and indicators for effective multi-stakeholder partnerships
- Whether technology can be used to facilitate collaboration through knowledge-sharing tools and the establishment of communities of practice
- Strategies to create an environment that supports effective multi-stakeholder partnerships, including partnerships between mainstream and immigrant-specific institutions
- The potential role of governments in creating a nourishing environment for the development and sustainability of multi-stakeholder partnerships