Pathways to Prosperity: Canada

The Pathways to Prosperity Partnership is collaborating with OCASI-Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants to initiate a new multi-faceted, multi-year, project entitled Agency of the Future. According to Meyer Burstein, the P2P’s Director of Policy and Planning, “the project’s overall strategic goal is to map the landscape of opportunities and constraints that will face settlement organizations between now and 2020 and, based on this mapping, to identify the strategies that will enable the sector to prosper.” Amplifying on this, Carl Nicholson, OCASI’s newly-elected President, states that the Agency of the Future project will help guide settlement agencies as they “… reinvent the business model they currently employ, identify the capacities they will need in the future, and think through the investments they will need to make to transition from their current state to one that is better aligned with economic, demographic and policy projections.” The project will also help settlement umbrella organizations plan the capacities they will need in order to provide leadership and support to agencies as they transform themselves. “Our sector is undergoing a sea change of enormous proportions …” says Debbie Douglas, OCASI’s Executive Director, “… and we are pleased to be an initiating partner in this critically important project. Sectoral umbrella organizations have an essential role to play in rethinking and redesigning the sector to promote innovation, education and overall market development.” As the Agency of the Future project begins to mature, OCASI and P2P will seek to broaden their partnership and to establish a national coalition and governance structure that will steer the initiative and ensure that its scope is truly pan-Canadian.