Focus on Not

Celestina Akinkunmi

Manager of CIWA’s Settlement and Integration Department

CALGARY IMMIGRANT WOMEN’S ASSOCIATION

Calgary Immigrant Women Association (CIWA) supports immigrants and refugee women, girls, and their families. They are a not-for-profit organisation established in 1982 as a registered charity. They are a culturally diverse settlement agency that recognises, responds to, and focuses on the unique concerns and needs of immigrant and refugee women, girls, and their families. They offer more than 50 programs and services for immigrant women and their families. They host programs and services in over 90 community locations. Clients fleeing family violence have access to emergency housing support, certified interpreters and translators who offer services in 37 languages. Over 230 businesses and employers collaborate with CIWA to support access to employment for immigrant women. We sat with Celestina Akinkunmi, the manager of CIWA’s Settlement and Integration Department recently.

Can you introduce yourself and what you do at CIWA?

My name is Celestina Akinkunmi. I am the manager of CIWA’s Settlement and Integration Department. Food security is treated as a major priority at CIWA. We source for funding that help us address the immediate food needs of immigrant women and their families.

What programs do you offer?

At CIWA, we have over 50 programs that cater to the basic, financial, employment, language and family needs of immigrant women and their families.

Food insecurity is a prevalent problem for new immigrants - how do you tackle this at CIWA?

Food security is treated as a major priority at CIWA. We source for funding that help us address the immediate food needs of immigrant women and their families. We offer direct supports through grocery cards and emergency food hampers as well indirect support through referrals to community organizations.

We hear from women immigrants that they struggle to find meaningful work—do you hear this? How often does CIWA get her clients meaningful work?

Our employment training programs at CIWA all have placement/employment outcomes, and these are always met or exceeded. The employment market is quite unstable as we all know, and therefore, our career counsellors help clients identify transferable skills that can they use to enter the job market. CIWA’s pre-employment skills program offers clients supports that can help them integrate into the job market. Career counsellors in the program work with clients to customize their resumés, offer them interview tips and strategies. Clients also have access to computer training ranging from beginner to advanced levels in Microsoft Office and other software to ensure that women have the necessary skills to succeed in the labour market. We provide our clients the opportunity to network with potential employers by hosting 12 networking breakfasts per year and we follow up regularly to ascertain positive employability and employment outcomes for all our clients.

Your work impacts families and communities—tell us some good stories.

Our clients have always presented with some amazing stories about the impact CIWA has had on their lives. I will share two examples with you:

Maggie (not her real name) came to CIWA to speak with her counsellor. She had just recently been through a traumatic separation and had a 7-monthold baby. She could not afford to pay her next month’s rent, with only $47.00 in her bank account, she was very desperate for help. A needs assessment was conducted by a settlement counsellor, and Maggie was provided with the following services to address her immediate needs: grocery cards to purchase food, referral to food bank, diapers, and dry food from CIWA pantry, rental subsidy from CIWA’s Find Me a Home program to cover one month’s rent, referral to a partner organization that provided the second month’s rent. To address her employment needs she connected to a career counsellor who worked with her on her resumé and provided her the necessary supports. By the sixth month of accessing services at CIWA, Maggie gained employment as a legal clerk through an employer who attended the networking breakfast. Ally originally from Kazakhstan, had two bachelor’s degrees in Foreign Languages & Environmental Science from her home country. She had 20 years work experience in administration, as an environment officer and as a bookkeeper in Kazakhstan and Israel. She reached out to a career counsellor at CIWA to seek support in enhancing her job search readiness skills and networking, as well as to obtain support with her resumé, interview skills and increasing her networking circle. Aly attended employment workshops on career planning, job search strategies and labour market trends, resumé writing and participated in mock interview sessions. After three months of connecting with CIWA, she got employed as an administrative assistant at a property management company.

How important are the services you offer to the community?

The services we offer are extremely important to the community. We cater to women of all language and education backgrounds. We provide services to over 15,000 clients annually. We have a strong community focus and ensure that we are bridging the gap to services/supports for immigrant women one woman at a time. Women connected to agency supports have been better served, especially during the current pandemic, than those lacking this connection. When the

connection is with a mid-to-large front-facing agency such as CIWA, services are offered quickly and even at the stage when women did not yet think to seek out support. Thousands of clients were called in the early weeks of the pandemic to ensure restrictions were understood, basic needs met, and employment training opportunities offered.

Food needs must be addressed, and clients come to the agency only when their situation is absolutely dire and this could be as a result of various factors such as shame, cultural views etc.

What are some of the challenges you have experienced and how did you overcome them?

Clients present a variety of barriers which mainly includes language, transportation, and childcare. We continue working on removing these barriers to participation by ensuring that we provide services with first language support either through CIWA staff or volunteer translators and interpreters. We also provide transportation supports to clients via taxi vouchers and bus tickets. Childcare is provided onsite (pre-pandemic) to clients accessing services with children 0-6 years. One of our biggest learning in the past year is that newcomers cannot successfully integrate without bridging the IT challenges that a lot of them present with. A unique solution to addressing the scarce resources has been to work with women’s own digital hardware asset, their smartphone. More than 100 women have received training to use their own smartphone to receive training on MS Teams. Like other agencies, CIWA quickly learned that computer hardware needs must be met if women in the home are to progress. To date over 200 laptop loans have been executed. Food needs must be addressed, and clients come to the agency only when their situation is absolutely dire and this could be as a result of various factors such as shame, cultural views etc. We continue to provide basic needs support, financial and other emergency support regardless of immigration status for immigrant women and their families. These provisions also include reliable childcare, career coaching and mentoring and mental-health support to minimize the long-term negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic for immigrant women.

Where can we go to find more information about CIWA?

To learn more about CIWA, visit www.ciwa-online.com. To engage and stay updated, follow CIWA on social media: