Projects and Initiatives

My New St. John's Live Expo, 2023

The St. John's Local Immigration Partnership, with support from the City of St. John's, hosts the annual My New St. John's Expo event to familiarize newcomers with the invaluable resources available in our community.

With 40 tables staffed by a diverse group of community leaders and support associations, the goal of the event is to extend a warm welcome to existing and new members of our community, and to help drive engagement in all aspects of social, economic and cultural life in St. John's.

Collective Impact

Collective Impact is “an advanced form of collaboration which brings together different sectors for a common agenda to solve large complex problems”. The LIP is exploring using collective impact as a guiding framework to foster better collaboration and work towards long term impact. The LIP Employment and Labour Needs Working Group is piloting a collective impact process with the goal to improve newcomer employment outcomes.

Community Forum: 2017

On March 2, 2017 the LIP hosted its annual community engagement event at City Hall. The purpose of the forum was to increase the LIPs capacity to build a welcoming community through networking and information sharing. 85 people attended the forum, participating in a day long series of presentations and workshops on immigration in the province, promoting diversity in organizations, education and newcomer health and wellness.

In conjunction with the forum, the LIP partnered with the St. John's Board of Trade to offer an event called 'Hiring Newcomers: Employer Information Session'. The session included a local 'success story' describing the process and benefits of hiring newcomers to Canada, as well as a question-and-answer period with Sean Morency, Employer Liaison Officer for Atlantic Canada with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

Topics included:

• who is allowed to work in Canada?
• types of temporary resident status
• overseas recruiting
• the Express Entry program
• the Atlantic Immigration Pilot Program. 

For more information read the 2017 LIP Community Forum Report.

Brighter Future...Together

This year, the City of St. John's invited the public to recognize World Refugee Day by viewing a new photography exhibit by the Association for New Canadians in Wyatt Hall, City Hall. 'Brighter Future...Together' was photographed by Said Away, a student at the English as a Second Language Training Centre, who was a professional photographer in Syria. He took the photos of other English as a Second Language students over two days at various St. John's landmarks. The exhibit provided the public with an opportunity to interact with, and learn from, some of the newest members of the community.

Tales from Afar: Old Stories from New Residents

The St. John's Local Immigration Partnership and the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador (HFNL) are collecting old stories from new residents. The project shares the diversity of oral traditions that exist within the region and showcases traditional stories and folktales from around the world.

Sharing folktales can highlight the commonalities between cultures. It can help build an understanding between people by bridging cultural, political and religious views. Sharing stories we grew up with is a way of bringing people together.

Types of stories include folktales, legends, myths, stories of saints and miracles, ghost stories, fables, or traditional children's tales - any story that has been passed down orally.

Participants are:

• recent refugees
• temporary foreign workers
• international students
• newly arrived professionals
• economic migrants
• well-established immigrants who have long since made St. John's their home

Organizers will work with participants to edit the stories for publication once they are collected. The project will be developed into a booklet of world folktales and will be made available in print, online, and shared at community events and with key organizations.

Volunteer Project

Volunteering can be a great way to create strong social connections between new Canadians and Canadian-born residents. Volunteering also expands networks and develops skills for future employment. When organizations engage newcomer volunteers it can help them become effective employees by tapping into a diversity of competencies and experience, widening the pool of potential volunteers, and raising cultural awareness within the organization.
 
The LIP and the Association for New Canadians (ANC) work together to help voluntary organizations integrate simple supportive practices to address barriers newcomers may face in volunteering. Voluntary organizations will participate in a focus group and a volunteer fair to apply these practices to promoting volunteer opportunities. A toolkit with strategies to engage newcomer volunteers will be developed for voluntary organizations.