New immigrants think Burnaby needs more places to just hang out, according to research being conducted by the Burnaby Intercultural Planning Table.
The consortium, which consists of 25 local agencies that support immigrants and refugees in Burnaby, recently conducted focus groups and surveys with 84 recent immigrants from 25 different countries.
Over the next several months, their input will be used to help set priorities for a local strategic plan for settlement and immigration the planning table hopes to have in place by March 2016.
One thing was clear from the outset, according to project coordinator Jody Johnson.
“Almost without exception, new immigrants to Burnaby love Burnaby,” she told the NOW. “There was a real flood of reasons why Burnaby was really the best place to be.”
Johnson said newcomers love the city’s cultural diversity, central location, amenities, public transit, parks, post-secondary schools and proximity to the mountains.
But the city could do a better job helping people connect, according to participants.
“What emerged in the focus groups repeatedly was a desire to have more opportunities to convene, so more festivals, more street activities, more pubs,” Johnson said.
Employment, however, was the biggest challenge brought up during discussions, according to Johnson.
Especially difficult is getting out-of-country training, education and certification recognized in Canada.
There’s little cities can do about that, Johnson said, but there are some things Burnaby could do to help immigrants overcome employment barriers.
Newcomers, for example, are increasingly looking to volunteering as a way to gain Canadian experience, cultural competency, networks and a possible foot in the door for jobs, according to Johnson.
She said the strategic plan could include ways to encourage local employers to offer more volunteer positions, internships and mentorships.
Mostafa Raziei, a 30-year-old who came to Burnaby from Iran last July, told the NOW finding volunteer work here was hard because most organizations require a lot of paperwork.
He said he finally landed a spot at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in December.
“It was amazing,” he said. “The good thing is, when you go for volunteering, and when it’s an event, it means that you will be in contact of a lot of people and most of them Canadian. It’s a good experience to be in the society and be in contact of other people. You can test your abilities, especially language skills.”
Raziei, a recent graduate of the Burnaby school district’s LINC (Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada) program, took part in one of the recent focus groups with Johnson.
Like most participants, he said Burnaby offers plenty of support and programs, but new immigrants often don’t know about them because they tend to stick to their own communities.
“We are going to trust our friends and families,” Raziei said. “We are not going to trust, immediately, everybody that we see. That make everything hard.”
Raziei said programs should also be more effectively coordinated.
While he was happy with his LINC experience, for example, he has learned it is not recognized by post-secondary institutions.
Johnson said many focus-group participants voiced similar views, saying services and programs should be more integrated and easier to find out about.
One solution, she said, would be a centralized space.
“Imagine if you could create some kind of welcoming space, a welcome hub, and you arrive there and everybody knows it exists,” she said.
The City of Burnaby had a plan for just such a space nine years ago, but it languished because of a lack of support from the federal government, according to the city.
In 2006, Burnaby offered to contribute a 0.85-acre, $2.4-million plot of land by the intersection of Edmonds Street and Canada Way for an immigration hub.
In turn, the city asked the federal government to chip in $11.5 million for construction costs.
The proposal was presented to the federal standing committee on citizenship and immigration in December 2006, but the city never heard back from the committee, according to Coun. Sav Dhaliwal, who was part of the delegation to Ottawa.
“We did not get a formal no. We didn’t get anything,” he said. “So we then just assumed the matter was not of their interest.”
Burnaby’s land offer is off the table for now, but Dhaliwal said that could change in the future.
“Hopefully if governments change and a few things happen, we might want to rethink that,” he said. “That land is still available for community use.”
City of Burnaby senior social planner Margaret Manifold said the area would be ideal for an immigration hub.
“At the time, we had some good ideas about what all should be there,” she said, “and I think those ideas would still stand, just given our population and that we have so much rental housing around that area. It’s a landing point.”
Manifold said a number of services have clustered around the existing Edmonds Community Resource Centre and Edmonds Community School, but the city could do a lot more with federal support.
