2025/06/21 by Suva, Cesar, Liu, Jingzhou, Sigurdson, Erika +1
#Ethnic Minority #Immigrant #Newcomer #Racialized #Visible Minority
paper · doi:10.11575/prism/49004
Drawing on Calgary East-Zone Immigrants Collaborative (CENC) as a case study, this research examines the role of settlement organizations as part of the collaboration in responding to the COVID19 pandemic in Calgary. Adopted a community-based and cross-sectoral model of crisis response that addresses community connections (Eisenman et al., 2007; Leong et al., 2015) and temporary partnerships between multiple stakeholders (Bryson et al., 2006), findings in this study highlight the following perspectives: First, settlement organizations have a culturally diverse, multilingual staff, and extensive experience communicating with non-English speakers, crucial resources that were mobilized and translated for COVID-19 crisis response. These contexts facilitated CENC to demonstrate services with linguistic and cultural capacities, offer culturally appropriate food delivery, and provide culturally competent financial assistance and guidance. Second, settlement organizations between state agencies and grassroots communities were formed through one-on-one and small group conversation initiatives and pivoted for facilitating a crisis response to form long-established trust relations with immigrant communities. Thirdly, the CENC response involved in large part a repurposing of settlement organizations’ existing logistical and technological capabilities or infrastructure from financial literacy and job training services to public assistance benefits and unemployment support services, database infrastructure to referral systems, and catering to food delivery to meet shorter-term needs brought on by the pandemic. This study concludes that public agencies’ rapid crisis response support merged with settlement organizations’ settlement support for more integrated services that were responsive to urgent needs unique to the COVID-19 pandemic and particular to specific needs unique to immigrant communities.