March 9^th – Discussion on Future Areas for Collaboration and Next Steps

The roundtable participants identified the main principles that colleges and institutes adhere to related to the integration of immigrants, the process to follow to move forward with the immigration agenda of colleges and institutes, including advocacy and collaboration with important stakeholders and partners that should be involved in initiatives with colleges and institutes.

Principles

Roundtable participants identified the following principles that reflect the main areas on which colleges and institutes should focus to contribute to the effective integration of immigrants into the labour market:

• Increase awareness and understanding on the return on investment of accelerating the integration of immigrants into the labour market.
• Contribute to the enhancement of language training in terms of the increased levels of ESL and FSL offered at institutions and to offer more occupation-specific language training.
• Address the funding and limited capacity issues colleges and institutes are facing due to the increasing numbers of newcomers seeking out programs and services and the funding cuts institutions have faced.
• Develop programs and services that enable institutions to meet the needs of multiple clients, and that benefit all client groups.
• Consider international students as a possible source of immigrants. How can colleges and institutes contribute to their selection and integration?
• Adopt a pan-Canadian approach and model that would offer a whole suite of services for immigrants, including the possibility of offering some services overseas for prospective and approved immigrants before they leave their country of origin.
• Develop a strategy to train and hire foreign trained professionals as faculty. Teacher of adults training could be offered to foreign trained professionals and thus enable them to be employed at a college or institute as instructors, for example engineers teaching in technology areas.
• Promote collaborative approaches to delivery so that work is not duplicated, for example, between colleges and institutes and immigrant settlement organizations and credentialing associations.
• Address the lack of consistent data that exists on immigrants as a client base for colleges and institutes.

Process

The main steps identified for moving this agenda forward for colleges and institutes are as follows:

• Create an ACCC Task Group on Immigration that would be time limited and will have representation from colleges and institutes from across the country as well as external members from government and non– governmental organizations. The task group could work on policy and advocacy initiatives as well as program development.
• Explore the possibility of organizing a larger event for colleges and institutes such as an immigration symposium later in 2004.