WCI Governance Information
The Welcoming Communities Initiative (WCI) is a multidisciplinary alliance of universities, colleges, and community organizations dedicated to promoting the integration of immigrants and minorities across Ontario. To achieve this goal, the WCI seeks to implement a comprehensive program of research aimed at devising, improving and testing measures to attract, retain, and integrate newcomers, including students and foreign workers, in cities, towns and less populated locales. Many of these communities would like to grow their economies, renew their populace, and reinvigorate their labour markets.
The WCI favours research that combines local expertise with academic scholarship in order to address practical concerns and challenges. In particular, the Initiative promotes comparative work that engages local stakeholders, scrutinizes promising practices, communicates effectively, and drives innovation and improvements. The WCI maintains a strong policy focus aimed at helping federal, provincial, and municipal departments develop and improve their policy and program interventions, especially in the area of welcoming and inclusive communities. Support for the WCI comes from a 2009 SSHRC CURA grant, as well as from a range of federal and provincial agencies.
Membership
The primary benefit of participating in the WCI is the opportunity it affords individuals and institutions to make a difference in the lives of newcomers and Ontario communities. Members can work with others who have similar interests and aspirations. Greater effectiveness serves as a powerful inducement to membership. More specifically:
- Local groups, particularly the LIPs, gain access to research and expertise; they enhance their leverage by capitalizing on the prestige and convening capacity of universities; and they benefit from access to students, training in research methods, and more effective, research-based advocacy.
- Academic participants gain access to local knowledge and the network of policymakers and practitioners that the WCI has convened. Membership greatly expands the opportunities for researchers, students, postdoctoral fellows, and community researchers to participate in a wide range of comparative research projects with members in other faculties and institutions, not only in Ontario but in other provinces and internationally.
- Policymakers and program developers benefit from hands-on, results-focused research and practical advice that is grounded and nuanced. The WCI is committed to developing productive, collaborative and respectful relations with governments at all levels.
Knowledge Mobilization and Exchange
The WCI’s evolving communications and educational machinery (including the website, conferences and workshops, a summer institute, and support for distance learning and related new media technologies) aims to promote knowledge exchange and to strengthen relations across the policy, practitioner and research communities. The goal is to contribute to the development of a common strategic platform and a better appreciation of shared interests. As well, the WCI is committed to training and educating the next generation of researchers, policymakers, and practitioners.
Governance
The WCI’s organization is designed to support a durable research and governance infrastructure that promotes policy and best-practice research, and forges connections among researchers, local institutions, newcomer organizations, and government agencies. The infrastructure extends to the creation of active research planning bodies; frequent workshops where stakeholders can discuss important issues from a horizontal perspective, without regard to jurisdiction; and programs within academic institutions that create an appetite among young scholars to enter and work in the field.