Strategic Plan: Progress Report

The plan identifies goals relating to service excellence, sector leadership, organizational capacity (‘enablers’), and actions linked to critical social justice issues. 

Here are some highlights of our year’s progress. 

Service Excellence 

• We undertook a comprehensive review of current systems, promising and innovative practices to enhance service accessibility and client experience in response to the recent IRCC CFPs (call for proposals). We will fully introduce these starting April 2025.
• We also prepared for the next iteration of provincially-funded temporary resident and naturalized citizen services that were launched April 2024. We are proud to be a provider for the BC Newcomer Services Program (BC NSP) delivering all-in-one settlement, language and job support for temporary residents and naturalized citizens, and the BC Services and Assistance for Humanitarian and Vulnerable Newcomers Program (BC SAFE HAVEN), providing specialized support for refugee claimants and asylum seekers.
• We invested in improving quality, conducting policy reviews, and implementing new processes to act on client feedback. Alongside mandatory data reports for funders, we are enhancing our customer experience evaluation tools in NewTrack³, our proprietary immigration CRM (client relationship management system).

Sector Leadership

• ISSofBC has long been an active voice in representing the interests of newcomers of all types and the wider settlement sector. Over the last year, senior leaders and a range of staff played active roles on numerous national, provincial, and local panels, committees, boards, and leadership groups, particularly regarding refugee resettlement and the Ukrainian emergency travel program. Here in BC, we helped shape the new International Credentials Recognition Act, approved in November 2023.
• We welcomed many political and civil leaders to our sites to meet with staff and clients – all the while raising awareness of the needs of newcomers. In May of 2023, we closed our groundbreaking New Perspectives series with a moderated panel discussion on the future of immigration to Canada.
• In March, Chris Friesen, our COO, won the Metropolis national service provider award in recognition of his 3-decades of sector leadership. Our CEO, Jonathan Oldman, was included in the “BC500 2023” a list of BC’s most influential business leaders published by the Business in Vancouver magazine.
• We continue to be a partner with several research institutions and bodies in the sector, contributing to a range of studies. In September we published our own multi-year research report, Sustaining Welcome: Longitudinal on Integration with Resettled Syrian Refugees, follows the integration journeys of over 200 resettled Syrian refugees living in British Columbia from 2017-2020.
• Like many organizations in our sector, we are aiming towards climate change adaptation, particularly given the impact this has on migration patterns around the world. Despite some limited actions to improve our operational sustainability, we still need to achieve more in this area.