Our Story
Learning Journeys is a 2-year participatory research project funded by Immigration Refugees Citizenship Canada (IRCC) and led by Pacific Immigrant Resources Society (PIRS) to
increase knowledge and deepen understanding of immigrant women’s experiences and perspectives in the contexts of their settlement programming;
engage stakeholders’ experiences and perspectives to imbed user-centred design principles into settlement programming;
test out and provide outcomes-based evidence for new or adapted models or interventions that support women in their goals related to economic participation.
The current phase of the project was completed in March 2021. We were guided by the journeys of immigrant women and fuelled by collaborating with inspiring service providers partners who share our goals and values. Together, we were learning, supporting each other to be courageous, responsive and impactful, and re-defining the roles that immigrant women can play in our communities and workspaces.
PIRS would like to acknowledge the immense contribution of Andrea Solnes in developing and leading this project, as well as all those who ensured its success!
Immigrant Women’s Advisory Committee
Starting with Strengths
In our Ethnographic Research, 10 immigrant women brought their strengths, stories, challenges and experiences of settling in Canada to the table by participating in interviews and group sessions. We laughed, we cried, we learned about what has worked for them (and what hasn’t), and were inspired to adapt this guiding question as a subtext for our research: What happens when we start with strengths?
These 10 women plus 3 more participants formed our Immigrant Women’s Advisory Group who continue to participate in the various stages of the project and have taken lead roles in moving initiatives forward.
Please see Our Team and Projects pages to learn more about who they are and what amazing work they're doing.
Learning Lab
Exploring, Designing, Testing
Immigrant women, service providers and other stakeholders are taking a deep dive into the challenges most often faced by immigrant women, and through a systems lens generating innovative ideas and testing potential solutions:
Workshop 1 explored the challenges and opportunities in existing programs, and started to illuminate systems level insights based on the themes identified in Ethnography. Groups started to think about novel approaches and ideas: What if we didn’t look at immigrant women in silos, and instead brought women together from outside of organizations and sectors? What if we could build custom support relevant to someone’s specific career goals, barriers and strengths? What if we had more immigrant woman influencers like Lily Singh “Superwoman”? How many problems could we solve if we compensated immigrant women for their contributions?
Workshop 2 saw three groups generating more ideas and then honing in on the best ones with design criteria based on Ethnography and known best practices. Participants considered, for example: Does your idea provide meaningful engagement, as defined by the immigrant women it serves? Does it consider child care issues? Is it strength-based? Is it collaborative? Groups then built an Action Plan to start testing their best idea.
Workshop 3 went online due to Covid-19. The Immigrant Women’s Advisory Committee took on a primary role in providing feedback to groups' ideas, and members took lead roles in each of the groups. Their roles included research, consulting with new partners, co-faciliating pilot sessions, and guiding and supporting social media initiatives. New opportunities were advanced despite the challenges of the times as groups focused and sustained their efforts in moving ideas to actions.
Some of the feedback from our Lab: Inspired by women’s strength; Recognition of the process to dig into complexity; ❤️Completing instead of Competing; Relief; Hope; Safe place to share; Validated my thoughts; Refreshed
We are excited to share the knowledge and capacity groups are co-creating. Please visit our Projects pages to learn more, and mark your calendars for the online Learning Fair where groups will showcase their Lab work.
Evaluation
Here is what we learnt
