Settlement Agencies

Immigrant-service agencies ("settlement agencies") provide community and social programs for immigrants and refugees in Ontario. These agencies provide a wide range of programs and services which help immigrants adapt to life in Ontario. Many agencies offer specialized programs for women, refugees, seniors and young people.

Responding to Intimate Partner Violence: Refugee Assistance Program Workers Relaunch

Refugee women sometimes experience intimate partner violence. Do you know how pre-migration and migration trauma can impact the safety of refugee women and their families? Do you know how to work collaboratively with violence against women experts in your community? Does your organization have policies and protocols in place to help you respond safely and effectively to situations of intimate partner violence?

We hope that you will accept our invitation to take advantage of this free training for yourself or your organization to help standardize your RAP workers' approach to aiding female refugee survivors of violence.

Ontario Provides More Than $1 Billion In Support for Small Business

March 2, 2021 - TORONTO — The Ontario government has to-date provided more than $1 billion through the Ontario Small Business Support Grant to help eligible business owners affected by the COVID-19 restrictions. The grant provides a minimum of $10,000 to a maximum of $20,000 and can be used in whatever way makes the most sense for individual businesses; from paying employee wages, to offsetting the cost of rent, to purchasing inventory.

OCASI wants to hear from you, settlement practitioners!

In order to better serve its communities of settlement practitioners, OCASI is organizing a survey for its 2 bilingual knowledge hubs, SettlementAtWork and its French counterpart SecteurEtablissement.

The short survey will allow OCASI to get feedback and more insight on how settlement practitioners have been using these platforms so far and how they would like to see them evolve in the near future. A win-win situation!

ICES Report on COVID-19 in Immigrants and Refugees in Toronto

The ICES recently published a report on the impact of COVID-19 in Immigrants, Refugees and Other Recent OHIP Registrants in Toronto, data as of November 1, 2020 and trends over time as of November 7, 2020, fully titled "Key findings from ICES Report on COVID-19 in Immigrants, Refugees and Other Recent OHIP Registrants (Guttmann A,
Gandhi S, Wanigaratne S, Lu H, Ferreira-Legere LE. Toronto, ON: ICES; 2020.)".

Some key findings are:

Health & Safety Awareness Presentation

WSPS' Health & Safety Awareness Presentation (HSAP) gives students, new immigrants and other vulnerable workers the crucial information they need to ensure their health and safety on the job. Free of charge, these sessions can be presented to classrooms of any size – including general assemblies – and are delivered by trained WSPS volunteers.

HSAP can be delivered in English or French. For all other language inquiries, please contact hsapregistrations@wsps.ca.

Imagine Canada’s Sector Monitor Charities & the COVID-19 Pandemic

This report summarizes the responses of 1,458 leaders of charities who answered our online survey between April 15th and April 28th.1 All responses are weighted by organization size, activity area, region, principal source of revenue, and the presence of paid staff to produce estimates more representative of charities overall. Historical comparisons are based on our first Sector Monitor, conducted in late 2009 / early 2010, just as the 2008/09 recession was ending and the long economic recovery beginning