Post Creative Forum Summary

Post-Creative Forum Summary
Prepared by Shirley Eu

Creative Forum
When: 21 March 2008 (Friday)
Where: Shirley’s home
Attended by: Bob & Leri Canlas (Filipinos), Sim Lumongsud (Filipino), Winnie Lui (Hong Kong), Bill Vaxevanis (Ethnic bkgd: Greek), Shar Dubas (Canadian) and Shirley Eu (Singaporean)

Key points we talked about:

1. What are some things we, as immigrants to Canada would like to know?
- Where to live, map of the area, public transportation, medical services, leisure, language courses, free stuff, $ saving tips, church, finding a bank, job search,
where to purchase groceries, where the library is, immigrant services, cultural
directory, associations/clubs, websites that are immigrant-helpful.

2. What can we do differently to “adopt” and help immigrants that isn’t done today?
- Be a coach. Help practically.

3. Some problems we face:
- Too many immigrants are coming, too few of us, need partnering with govt
before we have credibility, difficult to define criteria for how to help, how long
we would avail ourselves to help, unsure how to surface immigrants to help immigrants.

4. Working title: Immigrants helping immigrants
• We would be better off once more working with churches who have immigrants willing to help others from their own culture settle in rather than create a new non-profit/ non-religious organization looking to find government grant.
• Name card idea/ short leaflet with immigrant services to hand out to immigrants at the airport or to churches who can help put in the hands of the right people.
• Help connect immigrants by advertising for the World Café meeting once a month.

5. Interesting points we discussed:
- How can we reach the immigrant before they even leave their country?
- Could we put a kiosk at the airport to meet the immigrants?
- Create a website specific to connect immigrants to the help they need. Blogsite?
- How do we finance this without a government grant?
- Can we do this with a government grant?
- Our primary motivation is to help immigrants settle, help them belong and in the course of our friendship introduce them to Jesus Christ.

Action points:

1. We would like to investigate how immigrants are settling into Canada (those who have arrived the last 12 months).
2. We would like to assess how they’ve been helped/ how they haven’t been helped.
3. We would like to enquire how many immigrants in our churches would be keen to be immigrants-helping-immigrants?

Shirley will look into possibilities of obtaining a government grant.
Bob and Leri are considering designing an immigrant newsletter.
Sim is interviewing immigrants.