Abstract
How do settlement service providers promote resilience amongst refugee clients? Connections are made with people, not organizations. However, the personality of individual workers is not the primary predictor of a client’s success and resilience. Settlement workers exercise varying levels of flexibility in order to meet a client’s unique needs, and the degree of flexibility is a product of the agency’s culture, its policies and programming options, and the professional support available to its staff. This chapter examines how individual settlement workers can support the settlement and resilience of both individual refugees and the communities that they are a part of, and how individual staff are supported by the broader settlement service provision community, including within the workplace.
To focus exclusively on services is to misunderstand the nature of settlement and the full influence of settlement agencies. In fact, the name—service provider organizations—is misleading and makes the mistake of assuming that what governments pay for is what agencies are.
—Burstein 2010, p. 6
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Notes
- 1.
Credentialed professions, such as social workers and psychologists, can also engage in settlement work, but are usually referred to by their professional designation, leaving the “nuts and bolts” of starting a life in Canada to settlement workers within their agency.
- 2.
All proper names have been anonymized in this chapter.
- 3.
Over 80 % of the participants in the Refugee Mental Health Practices study who were agency staff were female, a proportion that the most recent complete Census data on the job category “Community and social service workers,” where 78 % are female (Statistics Canada 2006).
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Vasilevska, B. (2014). The Role of Settlement Agencies in Promoting Refugee Resilience. In: Simich, L., Andermann, L. (eds) Refuge and Resilience. International Perspectives on Migration, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7923-5_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7923-5_11
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