Refugee and Newcomers Emotional Wellness Partnership for Best Practices

Refugee and Newcomers Emotional Wellness (ReNEW) Partnership for Best Practices was a fundamental project in advancing our organizations’ efforts to address the mental health and emotional wellness of immigrants. This project provided valuable insight on what is and isn’t available for newcomers who have mental and emotional wellness concerns in major prairie province cities.  

Project Information

What is the ReNEW Partnership for Best Practices project?

ReNEW Partnership for Best Practices was a three-year, Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada funded research collaboration between The Immigrant Education Society (TIES) and the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Nursing. TIES partnered with four settlement serving agencies in Edmonton, Saskatoon and Winnipeg to identify areas where emotional wellness services can better support immigrants through stressful aspects of resettlement.

What were the aims of ReNEW Partnership for Best Practices?

This study aimed to:

• Examine newcomer mental health and emotional wellness issues and support across agencies in Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon and Winnipeg.
• Identify the structural roots of factors affecting emotional wellness.  
• Suggest practical and sustainable ways that Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) service providers in Canadian prairie cities might be able to mitigate some of the causes of negative stress.

Why is this important?

Resettlement can be a difficult period of anxiety, isolation, and uncertainty. Newcomers often struggle with a variety of stressors during their adjustment period due to conflicts with the new, and often different culture of the host country (Ruiz, 2011). The range of stressors immigrants experience when encountering new cultures has often been referred to as acculturative stress (Ruiz, 2011, p. 161). Such stressors can aggregate into clinical mental health issues like depression (Finlayson, 2016, p. 239). Other times, it can affect the emotional wellness and well-being of individuals. Emotional wellness in immigrants encompasses their emotional health throughout their settlement experience.  

Settlement agency staff and instructors who act as trusted intermediaries have expressed feelings of helplessness and a sense of obligation to do their utmost to ease the cultural transition for their students (Au et al., 2021). Student issues can include acculturative stress whose sources and solutions are located outside of the classroom (Au et al., 2021). Staff may be unequipped to address clients’ emotional wellness issues and even more so with serious mental health conditions. ReNEW highlighted the voices of both students and staff regarding newcomer mental health and emotional wellness across multiple agencies in the prairie provinces and established best practices to address these issues.

Research Overview

Methods

Data Collection

• Conducted review of documents and literature on mental health and wellness provision in Canadian settlement agencies.
• Developed and distributed 60 teacher and over 750 student Knowledge, Attitude and Practice (KAP) Surveys.
• Conducted 14 individual interviews with clients regarding mental health issues and the support they have received from their immigrant serving agencies.
• Completed 13 teacher and manager focus groups to understand their experiences and views on the mental health and emotional issues support that clients are requesting and receiving.

Pilot Projects

• Developed a pilot service delivery model for implementation at local partner agencies.
• Obtained feedback, analyzed and evaluated the service delivery model.

Dissemination

• Shared research results to both the immigrant serving sector in Canada and the academic community through presentations at academic and industry-related conferences, academic publications, and web-based promotions.

Key Findings

• Clients were largely concerned about acculturative and adjustment-related stress experienced during the settlement process.
• There are ongoing issues of access to community and municipal supports for both staff and clients.
• The operating environment of settlement agencies imposes structural constraints on offering supports “closer to home” where clients have easier access.
• Front-line staff are often compelled to act beyond their scope of practice when client needs are more immediate.

Recommendations

• LINC providers could benefit from greater consistency in approaches.
• A viable avenue for better emotional wellness supports is to embed, through capacity building, better informed approaches within current workplace practices of front-line staff, such as lesson planning, classroom management and client engagement.

Impacts

ReNEW was one of our first inquiries into newcomer mental health and emotional wellness issues. This research has contributed to the development of:

• Change Can’t Wait pilot workshops, where English-language instructors and settlement staff learned methods in the new pedagogical approach.
• TIES Healthy Minds, a free online counselling platform for individuals, couples, and families.

Learn More

If you would like to learn more about the ReNEW Research Study, you can read our publications:

• Taking Action: Agency Reaction to the Refugees and Newcomers Emotional Wellness (ReNEW) Research Study, page 99-113.
• Activities and programmes that support the emotional wellness and well-being of refugees, immigrants and other newcomers within settlement agencies: A scoping review protocol.
• ReNEW Partnership for Best Practice: Briefing Report
• ReNEW Partnership for Best Practice: Anthropology in Action in a Community-based Setting

References

Au, A., Silversides, H., Suva, C., Palova, K., & Goopy, S. (2021). “Language alludes to everything”: A pilot study on front-line worker experience with newcomer integration. Journal of Student Research, 10(1),1-11. https://doi.org/10.47611/jsr.v10i1.1137

Finlayson, J. (2016). Is migration good for you? A psychiatric and historical perspective. In M. Harper (Ed.), Migration and Mental Health: Past and Present (pp.239–258). London, UK: Palgrave MacMillan.

Ruiz, P., Maggi, I.C., & Yusim, A. (2011). The impact of acculturative stress on the mental health of migrants. In D. Bhurga & S. Gupta (Eds.), Migration and Mental Health (pp. 159–171). Cambridge University Press.

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