Picture this: women, working to get footholds in a new country, are armed with cameras. What will the pictures they take tell them about the journey they’re on? What will they tell the new country about itself?

Choon Lee Chai hopes the photos will fill in details and open up discussion on the programs and services available for immigrant women in a small city in central Alberta. He and his colleagues at Red Deer College and the University of Calgary are using a Community and College Social Innovation Fund grant to find out from immigrant women how those programs meet their needs and where they need improvement.

Part of their research is a technique called “Photovoice.” Fifty women involved in the project — which is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council — will take pictures to illustrate the role of immigrant services in their everyday lives.

Sharing the photos with other immigrants and the researchers will elicit more than simple surveys can to expose what works and what doesn’t among Red Deer’s supports for immigrant women, Chai, the project’s director, explained in an interview.

The photos ground the research in reality and help the women establish what issues matter to them. “So much freedom is possible to explore and express their feelings,” Chai said. “One of its key strengths is what the photo reminds you of, it elicits responses a normal interview would not.”

Immigrant women are an important part of Canada’s economy, making up about 20 per cent of both the country’s total female population and its labour force. But new immigrants have more than double the unemployment rates of those who were born here, even though they are more likely to hold university degrees.

The project’s first year will be spent forming an advisory council of immigrants, representatives of government and non-government agencies and business people.  Then about 150 immigrant women will be interviewed about services in Central Alberta (Red Deer and the surrounding communities).

This project follows another, also a partnership between Red Deer College and the Central Alberta Immigrant Women’s Association. It looked at the economic security of immigrant women and found they face many barriers. But follow-up was needed on evaluating services for immigrant women and tailoring them to their needs.

“It’s best they have a role in that follow up,” Chai says. “I really don’t want it to be researchers going into the community and telling them what the problem is. My approach is to say you have ideas, you have talents, let’s work together.”

The photos and stories will be shared in exhibitions and presentations. Focus groups will be held with employers and other stakeholders and CAIWA will work with the women to modify or create new programs.

“Of course there are structural barriers that society as a whole has to address, but I don’t want to overlook the fact immigrant women have a lot of strengths and ideas,” Chai said.

About Red Deer Polytechnic

Red Deer Polytechnic is central Alberta’s largest post-secondary institution, serving more than 10,000 credit, non-credit and apprenticeship students. Since becoming a polytechnic institute in 2021,... Learn more

They might seem a world apart, busy college students and homeless people, drifting around the downtown streets of a big city, but many share a hidden bond: they are lonely. Researchers in Edmonton are trying to help.

A research team from Norquest College is working in partnership with the Edmonton Public Library, to study the impact of loneliness on marginalized people. The project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Community and College Social Innovation Fund.

The project began when Bob Marvin, a social work instructor at Norquest College, asked students in one of his courses to administer a questionnaire on loneliness to other students. “It was just for the students to get started on research, an attempt to demystify research,” he said in an interview.

The survey, however, opened up a conversation about loneliness on campus, with many students surprised to find they were not alone in what they felt. Marlene Mulder, of Norquest’s research department, was helping to analyse the data in the loneliness survey and noticed some surprising results. Second year students were lonelier than first years, and 60 per cent said they missed their families. That’s notably high for college students.

Mulder was aware that Norquest, the only publicly funded college in Edmonton, has an unusual student population. Because of its English as a second language program, it has a high percentage of newcomers to Canada. There is also a high proportion of Aboriginal students, and a large number of students who have gone through troubled times and have come to college in an effort to start again. “I come from a background working with newcomers to Canada, and with the homeless, and loneliness always comes up. Loneliness is a theme in both those populations,” she said.

Mulder wondered what impact loneliness has on people who live on the margins of the community, whether they are Aboriginal, homeless, or newcomers. What does it mean for their “social capital,” which is defined as “the social interactions, good will, fellowship, and sympathy that make a tangible difference in our lives.” Or, as Mulder puts it, the things that help you move forward.

Those thoughts led in turn to the Edmonton Public Library, which for more than five years has had social workers on staff to assist marginalized people who come to the library as a safe public space. The social workers build relationships and trust with these isolated members, helping them when possible with medical, housing and other issues.

As a partner in the project, the library is the link between the researchers and its patrons, providing the opportunity to explore causes of marginalization, to ask which supports work and what is still needed, and perhaps get them access to education.

The researchers have also enlisted the help of more than 40 community agencies, to help shape the research, and they’ll also be talking to Norquest students who have come back from the margins, asking what helps to build a better life. Finally, they will join the library’s patrons in focus groups.

About NorQuest College

As Alberta’s largest community college, NorQuest provides a work-relevant education that includes hands-on learning opportunities, workplace practicums, and supportive instructors. From class to career, NorQuest... Learn more

Calculating the value of unquantifiable change, identifying the ingredients of intangible success — it is no easy task to plan and evaluate social innovation. Yet, in the face of competing needs and limited resources, it must be done.

“The more you understand why something was or was not successful the more you can generalize later and come up with best practices that will help future projects have success,” said Russ Wilde, of Bow Valley College in Calgary.

Wilde is directing a project to develop evidence-based criteria for evaluating social innovation and to identify factors that promote or inhibit its success. The project is one of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Community and College Social Innovation Fund grants. Its goal is to create tools to guide stakeholders through choosing and planning social innovation projects, and evaluating how well they worked.

Wilde and colleagues from Bow Valley College are working in partnership with the Town of High River, the United Way of Calgary and Area and Mount Royal University. The multi-stage, multi-year project will start with a questionnaire asking organizations involved in social innovation what they think its characteristics are and what barriers and facilitators affect social-innovation projects.

The questionnaire is being distributed as widely as possible — with the United Way as a partner, the project has deep reach into social innovation of all kinds — and will continue to be circulated until no new concepts are being brought up in answers. But what those concepts add up to is critical for the project, because such a broad range of activities are labelled social innovation. Defining it is difficult and doing research on it at a broad level is extremely challenging.

“One of the results of this research will be whether you can come up with a generalized set of criteria that is applicable to a broad range of social innovation projects,” said Scott Henwood, lead researcher for the project.

Based on the questionnaire, discussions with stakeholders and a literature review, the researchers will try to determine what qualifies something as a social innovation, what factors must combine to make it a success and what things are barriers or impediments to social innovation.

The next step is to create and test tools for planning and evaluating social innovations, including one with the Town of High River, a partner in the project. After the flood that devastated the town in 2013, there was a rush of new projects in the community of 13,000 south of Calgary. That will let the researchers and steering committee choose a real-life example of a social innovation they think will be the best test for their criteria and ability to evaluate.

Social innovation is a difficult area in which to judge success, because changes that make a profound difference in the lives of people may not be easily quantifiable. The Bow Valley team believe the outcome of their project — an online toolkit for planning and evaluating social innovation — will help people with that challenging task.

About Bow Valley College

As Alberta’s largest community college and a proud partner in Campus Alberta, Bow Valley College serves 15,000 learners each year in Calgary and throughout southern... Learn more