Officials with the Cape Breton Local Immigration Partnership say they hope to learn some important information regarding how newcomers are welcomed and included on the Island.
Reps are hosting a total of 13 community sessions; one takes place at the Port Hawkesbury Civic Centre Tuesday afternoon.
Kailea Pedley, the group’s program manager, says stronger language services and exploring awareness options for the needs of newcomers are two things they’ve heard in earlier sessions.
Pedley tells The Hawk it’s important to get opinions from people in a variety of areas.
“We realize that those strengths and areas for improvement vary from community-to-community,” she says. “The story in Ingonish isn’t going to be the same as the story in St. Peter’s or New Waterford- that’s why we’re holding 13 sessions, to try to get a bit of a scan across the whole Island of what’s happening.”
Pedley says they want a variety of people to attend- residents who have lived on the Island all their lives and newcomers are two of the targets.
She says they’ll analyze the data.
“As we go along, we’ll be synthesizing that data to pull out the common themes, and to pull out some of the major trends that we’re seeing,” she says. “That will help us to identify, for our work, what some of the priority areas that we need to focus on in Cape Breton are.”
Pedley says action teams will be assigned once the data is compiled.