A 2023-24 Annual Impact Report story
Our 2023-24 Annual Impact Report highlighted stories about how we navigated significant changes over the past year. We are sharing these stories as they reflect how our work embodies our values and impacts those we collaborate with.
Facilitating interconnection and collaboration
We are unwavering in our commitment to meet people and organizations where they are. This commitment is the bedrock for building trust and relationships, ultimately facilitating interconnection and collaboration.
By collaborating with others, we can create paths that lead to greater success for all and ensure limited resources are shared. This is why we intentionally build these connections with not just the non-profit and social-serving communities but also across diverse sectors. We seek to work with people and organizations with varied perspectives, lived experiences, and practice expertise.
We also ensure that we conduct scans across different jurisdictions, various sectors, and research areas for knowledge, practice, policies, and tools that align with our mission. Finding interconnections between our work and those of other sectors can lead to meaningful collaborations that establish shared goals and leverage further opportunities.
“It is clear that PolicyWise is committed to forging strong bonds with other agencies that will result in strong collaboration for the best results for this project. It is a pleasure to work with them and the other partner agencies.”
—Julie McCrea, Adult Learning and Special Projects Lead
Newcomer Centre
Sharing insights for supporting Indigenous children and families
When the federal Act Respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis Children, Youth and Families became law in 2020, it recognized and affirmed the inherent Indigenous jurisdiction over child and family services. It also set national standards to protect Indigenous children’s rights to their culture.
Along with many child- and family-serving agencies in Alberta, the Bent Arrow Traditional Healing Society was on a journey of understanding and implementing the Act. Bent Arrow is an Edmonton-based, Indigenous-led child- and family-serving agency whose practices are grounded in Indigenous culture and ceremony. As soon as the Act was introduced in 2019, they were already using culturally responsive approaches to support Indigenous children and families.
As part of their journey to understand the Act and its standards, Bent Arrow’s team approached us at PolicyWise to collaborate on a case study to learn, document, and share Bent Arrow’s experiences implementing the Act, with the shared goal of supporting Indigenous children and families.
Beginning in ceremony, the PolicyWise project team saw their role as walking alongside the Bent Arrow team. We prioritized listening, relationship building, and experiential learning. Through our collaborative and iterative approach, our two teams determined that the case study should be shared visually to resonate with Bent Arrow’s approaches to knowledge sharing. This way of working led us to create a visual map inspired by Bent Arrow’s Practise as Ceremony model and beadwork.
The final case study we collaboratively developed from this process offers insights to child- and family-serving agencies about how to practise differently, navigate challenges, meet the Act’s national standards, and best serve Indigenous children and families.
“PolicyWise was instrumental in helping us to map a journey to a desired change state. We were able to take that to our sector to pilot an alternative way of service delivery that still works to desired outcomes through a different worldview lens. Our journey with PolicyWise was fantastic. Their staff were engaged and as passionate about the work as we were.”
—Cheryl Whiskeyjack, Executive Director
Bent Arrow Traditional Healing Society
Reducing employment barriers for newcomer young adults
High job turnover and vacancy rates have been an ongoing challenge for Alberta’s food and beverage sector. In late 2023, the job vacancy rate was 8.3%, the highest of any sector in the province.
One way Alberta’s food and beverage sector could reduce its job vacancy rate is by recruiting newcomer young adults. These young adults are 18 to 29 years old and arrived in Canada within the past five years. Many of them no longer attend school or take part in other employment training, and many are unemployed. In 2020, the unemployment rate of this group was 19.8%.
With support from Alberta’s Ministry of Jobs, Economy, and Trade, we set out to understand the systemic labour issues within the food and beverage sector and how hiring newcomer young adults could resolve some of these challenges.
This past year, our project team began a two-year investigation on how to create solutions that work for both the sector and newcomer young adults. They are using a collaborative approach by partnering and connecting with food and beverage sector employers, sector associations, newcomer young adults, and community support agencies.
As part of this work with the food and beverage sector, newcomer young adults, and community support agencies, our team recently released its first summary report at the end of the fiscal year, titled Supporting Newcomer Young Adult Employment in the Food and Beverage Sector.
The report identifies the barriers to employment for newcomer young adults in the food and beverage sector. It provides five principles and actions newcomer young adults, food and beverage operators, and social and community support agencies can take to reduce these barriers. It also shares how these principles can support newcomer young adults more broadly, for example, by providing them with information on accessing health, social, and community assistance.
The team is also hosting an informative webinar, Recipe for Retention: Supporting Newcomer Young Adults to Strengthen Your Food & Beverage Team. It will take place on Tuesday, December 10, 2024 at 9:00 a.m. MT, and will explore their research and collaborative work on how Alberta’s food and beverage sector can write a new recipe for employee recruitment and retention.
For more details about this webinar, read our recent news story.
As the project team continues into the following year, they will be collaborating with their partners to develop and share their final case study and recommendations.
To learn more about how PolicyWise is making an impact and to read similar stories, check out our 2023-24 Annual Impact Report.
