Last year, OCASI’s Positive Spaces Initiative approached Erica Whyte, a futurist with a background in design thinking and business development, to co-create a campaign designed to inform interactions between service providers on LGBTQIA+ immigrants and refugees living in Ontario.
April and May were really busy months for PSI! We delivered 8 positive spaces workshops to over 100 service providers, staff and volunteers in 10 organizations and agencies in Ontario:
This is so exciting! We are currently in the process of making some changes to our website. This includes having a blog section where you can read articles related to our workshops and events as well as current community news and information.
We are honored to be one of the projects that is featured on the Citizenship and Immigration Canada's "Best Practices in Settlement Services".
We have been traveling throughout the province to deliver workshops to service providers across sectors on how to create welcoming spaces in their agencies and organizations that is inclusive and free from discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression. Last year, we did lots of workshops in the Western, Central and Southern regions of Ontario. This year, we will continue to do training in these regions but we also want to go North and East! So if you are in the Northern and Eastern Ontario regions, please give us a shout so we can come and do the FREE positive spaces workshop.
What a busy month it has been! For October, PSI has been busy traveling, delivering workshops and engaging service providers and community members in dialogues on creating welcoming and inclusive spaces for LGBTQ + newcomer clients to be able to access culturally appropriate services with dignity and respect as well as staff to be able to work free from discrimination, harrassment and violence. We delivered a total of 8 workshop sessions - including a 2- day PD Conference in London, Ontario as well as 3 workshops for students of Social Service Worker Program at Seneca College. We were really excited to talk to these future service providers about the importance of positive spaces! Thank you for inviting us!
The Positive Spaces Initiative and everyone here at OCASI wishes everyone a happy holiday season! We hope that 2013 will be an amazing, wonderful, successful and fabulous year to each and everyone of you! We will be uploading a "PSI 2012 Report" in a few days! Watch out for it. :)
It's been a while since we did a PSI update! Since March is the end of the "fiscal year", we created a PSI Annual Activity Report which we will upload to this site soon. It will document the many incredible achievements that PSI has accomplished this year. Here are the highlights of the report:
First of all, thank you so much to everybody that attended Identity, Migration & Policies: Journeys of LGBTQ+ Newcomers. The event was a success! We had really good feedback based on the evaluation forms that people filled out after the event. It was a wonderful opportunity to talk about LGBTQ+ newcomer issues and to network with other service providers across Toronto. Many people said that these kinds of forums and events are necessary because LGBTQ+ newcomers are very much under represented and not talked about enough in the mainstream LGBTQ discussions. So thank you everyone for coming!