Editor:
I would like to send my heartfelt thanks to the organizations, businesses and individuals in Kamloops for their support of the Welcoming Communities Program (WCP) over the past year.
The WCP, a partnership project between Kamloops Immigrant Services and the Kamloops Aboriginal Friendship Society, hosted its final community engagement event on Jan. 30 — the Evaluative and Next Steps Dialogue.
We were joined by more than 60 people who came together to discuss next steps for the WCP as it enters its final phase and to review the successes and challenges of the project to date.
We know there were many people who were interested in attending, but could not due to other commitments.
To ensure participation, we have developed an online survey to help us gather more community input for moving forward.
The WCP Next Steps Survey responses will be used to develop a recommendations paper on work that still needs to be done within this area.
This paper will be included in the legacy toolkit the WCP team is developing.
It will be available on our website — www.immigrantservice.ca/wcp — at the end of March.
Other items to be included in the toolkit include:
• Summary documents from all the WCP community engagement activities;
• Materials from the employers workshop series and a number of fact sheets discussing the myths and realities related to immigrant experiences in Canada.
Anyone interested in learning more about the WCP is invited to visit our site online at www.immigrantservice.ca/wcp.
If you have any questions, email welcoming.communities@kcris.ca or call 250-376-1296.
Thanks again to everyone who has committed their time and energy to this project.
Your contributions have been incredibly valuable.
Allysa Gredling,
Welcoming Communities co-ordinator
Kamloops
