ALLIES
ALLIES (Assisting Local Leaders with Immigrant Employment Strategies) creates more inclusive communities by helping skilled immigrants find jobs matching their skills. It is a joint program of the McConnell and Maytree Foundations, working with government, private and community sector partners.
Strategic Vision
Through ALLIES, the Foundation envisions a society in which new immigrants are better able to share their talent and creativity in a way that appropriately recognizes their professional experience, contributing both to their own well-being and to a more resilient Canada.
Granting Total
$3 million (+ $1 million from Maytree Foundation, $800,000 from Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and additional contributions from private sector and government partners)
Program History
ALLIES launched in 2007 to support Canadian communities in making improvements to their integration of skilled immigrants into the local workforce. It builds on the success of the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC), established by Maytree in 2003 as a multi-stakeholder council working to integrate skilled immigrants into the local economy.
ALLIES offers several programs tested by TRIEC, including Career Bridge; the Mentoring Partnership; hireimmigrants.ca and the Immigrant Success Awards. Each of these serve as components or templates for local initiatives. A learning network, as well as granting and technical support, are also available for communities accepted into the Allies program.
ALLIES held its first learning exchange - Leading with Ideas - in June 2009.
Key Lessons
- It is only through the active participation of employers, as well as the collaboration among four sectors (social, private, government and academic) that the ALLIES vision can be achieved.
- It is striking how little contact the social and private sectors – and the organizations belonging to them – have historically had; diplomacy, tact and time are necessary to become familiar with cross-sector colleagues and to develop trusting relationships.
- Research capacity is necessary to support the development of effective strategy and lend credibility to its application; links with the academic community have proved fruitful in this regard.
- Given that ALLIES is attempting to build on the success of a local model (TRIEC), it is important to clarify whether the intent is to encourage replication or knowledge transfer (see chart comparing the approaches) and to subsequently align funding objectives and process to intent.
- Overall, we have learned that this program is too young to point out specific ways it is engaging the population of new Canadians. Our explorations of ALLIES’ impact will involve more than dissemination of the model, however, and will ultimately rely on concrete research findings and comprehensive evaluation of the program’s eventual impact.