Youth Engagement in Ethnocultural Organizations in Winnipeg Report: Contributed by MIRRA Network Members

This report supplements a previous report, “Ethnocultural Community Organizations in Winnipeg: A Legacy Document”, that was written in 2018. Collectively, the two documents explore the role of ethnocultural community groups and organizations in providing services and supports for newcomers, and particularly refugees, in Winnipeg. The legacy document was written first to serve the immediate knowledge needs of the project’s community partner organization – Immigration Partnership Winnipeg (IPW), which is Winnipeg’s Local Immigration Partnership. Findings from the legacy document informed the successful creation of the Ethnocultural Council of Manitoba in June, 2018.
The present report completes this research project by providing a more comprehensive account of the types of services, programs, and supports provided by Winnipeg’s ethnocultural community groups to meet the needs of immigrants and refugees. In particular, this report focuses on the scope of immigrant and refugee youth engagement in ethnocultural community groups. Both documents are meant to inform staff at IPW as they develop initiatives to support the work of ethnocultural community groups and organizations and seek to better engage newcomer youth in their activities.
In addition to investigating the scope and scale of ethnocultural community groups’ and organizations’ provision of settlement services in the community, the study also explored the extent to which these services were aimed at assisting refugee families and youth. The research also examined the nature of youth engagement in ethnocultural community groups and documented initiatives in Winnipeg that reach out to refugee youth. A common concern of ethnocultural community groups is that they struggle to attract youth members and fear for the future of their organizations if youth are not better engaged. This research intended to explore the extent to which youth are engaged in such groups and what such groups are doing to reach out to young people in their communities.
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