Racialized Canadians
Current and Completed Projects:
Strategic evaluation and learning support for the Future Skills Centre
Over the past four years, the Future Skills Centre (FSC) has supported the development, refinement, or expansion of approaches to developing skills for workers from a variety of backgrounds and in a variety of sectors. These innovation projects are required to mobilize knowledge and evidence among key stakeholders, institutions, and decision-makers for the purposes of improving policies and practices in Canada. SRDC is developing a mix of retrospective and prospective evaluation approaches for a subset of up to 18 of these projects, dependent on the timelines and stage of development of each project. These involve quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis using document and data review, interviews with project partners and their FSC liaisons, implementation evaluation, and theory of change or logic model development. SRDC’s learning and evaluation framework is designed to capture what has been learned from these projects for the future development of the skills ecosystem in Canada.
Start-end date: October 2022 - September 2023
Sponsor: Future Skills Centre
Evidence Review and Mental Health Pilot Community Consultation for Girls' Fund Programs
The Girls’ Fund supports programs that give girls and gender-diverse youth tools to develop into confident, resilient people, right when they need this support most. In preparation for the next Girls’ Fund cohort, The Canadian Women’s Foundation (CWF) has commissioned an update of the evidence informing Girls’ Fund programming for adolescent girls and gender-diverse youth. Based on needs identified stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, CWF is also engaging with community organizations to understand their experiences with anti-oppressive mental health approaches for children and youth, in preparation for designing and implementing an anti-oppressive mental health pilot in Girls’ Fund programming.
Start-end date: September 2022 - March 2023
Sponsor: Canadian Women’s Foundation
Women First: Building skills for success
Funded through Employment and Social Development Canada’s Women’s Employment Readiness Pilot, the WOMEN FIRST project is a multi-partner initiative aiming to leverage employment and skills training to address barriers faced by multiply-marginalized women. Led by PTP Adult Learning and Employment Programs (PTP) in collaboration with five service delivery providers across the country, the project aims to draw on partners’ collective expertise to develop, test, and evaluate pre-employment and skills development supports. Specifically, the project seeks to build knowledge about approaches to programming, curriculum, and wraparound supports that best serve women facing multiple structural barriers, including low-income women, Indigenous women, racialized women, 2SLGBTQ+ women, newcomer women, and women with disabilities. SRDC is working closely with partners to design and implement an evaluation of the project, including the program delivery across all six pilot sites and new Skill for Success curriculum developed by partner Alberta Workforce Essential Skills. In particular, SRDC is supporting an evaluation grounded in principles of intersectional feminism, anti-oppression, equity, and justice.
Start-end date: July 2022 - September 2023
Sponsor: PTP Adult Learning and Employment Programs
Evaluation of the Increasing Access to Sexual and Reproductive Health Information project
Centre for Sexuality (C4S), in partnership with community stakeholders in Alberta, is co-creating and launching updated Relationship and Sexual Education (RSE) curricula, aimed at increasing access to sexual and reproductive health information, resources, and care in Alberta. SRDC is supporting the evaluation of the Increasing Access to Sexual and Reproductive Health Information project, which encompasses four distinct population-specific strategies supporting equity-deserving groups in Alberta: youth, 2SLGBTQ+, Indigenous youth and communities, and people with developmental disabilities. Building on and tailoring C4S’s RSE program, C4S will work with communities (and community advisory committees) to develop responsive program and training materials, implement these, and evaluate associated project processes and outcomes. SRDC will provide developmental evaluation support, supporting the co-design and implementation of evaluation tools across all four strategies, and for the project as a whole.
Start-end date: June 2022 - March 2024
Sponsor: Centre for Sexuality
Enhancing employment services through development and assessment of Skills for Success training
With the involvement of several project partners, SRDC is developing assessment and training resources to support both transferable and sector-based Skills for Success (SFS) programming; designing and implementing targeted and intensive SFS training to address individuals and employer needs; and customizing assessment and training resources for underrepresented groups. This is being done through a two‑model system ranging from “lighter touch” general training and capacity building to more intensive development, customization, and pilot testing of new training resources. More specifically, the project broadens and deepens existing capacity-building efforts in the skills and employment training sector by scaling up the use of our SFS-aligned online measurement platform; testing new SFS measurement options, including self-report and objective assessment methodologies; developing, delivering, and evaluating new SFS curricula, training resources, and assessment tools; and disseminating findings, best practices, and lessons learned to continue building sectoral knowledge and capacity.
Start-end date: June 2022 - March 2024
Sponsor: Employment and Social Development Canada
EMC Skills Evolution
EMC Skills Evolution is a national, industry-driven initiative that will provide new insights for scaling up sectoral micro-credentials, through the identification, validation, prioritization, and building of occupational competency frameworks for the manufacturing and other sectors, providing a sharable roadmap for developing and deploying workforce capability growth through a competency-based micro-credential approach. Specifically, this project seeks to define and apply an industry-driven, multi-sector methodology to micro-credential development and adoption, enabling manufacturers and employers in other sectors to more rapidly upskill and reskill their workforce, as well as to more quickly onboard newly recruited workers and facilitate broader recognition of relevant skills and workforce mobility.
Start-end date: June 2022 - August 2023
Sponsor: Excellence in Manufacturing Consortium
Skills for Success Implementation Guidance Development
The launch of Skills for Success in May 2021 leverages the core strength of the Essential Skills framework while tightening the alignment with modern labour market needs, with a greater focus on a range of socio-emotional skills. This project’s main objective is to produce a document outlining key principles and emerging practices to guide the implementation of Skills for Success, reflecting the Government of Canada’s commitment to create and update training programs, resources, and assessment materials, facilitate training participation of vulnerable groups, and build the capacity of stakeholders who serve these populations. Our approach will combine environmental scan and literature review with the involvement of an expert advisory panel representing training and sectoral organizations with nation-wide networks, to develop three broad kinds of content: i) identification of learning needs for underrepresented groups (e.g., Indigenous people, racialized Canadians, persons with disabilities) and key sectors; ii) guiding principles for the design of tailored training and assessment tools to align with identified learner and sectoral needs; and iii) implementation examples and approaches from early adopters of Skills for Success. These will be synthesized into a final report to facilitate tool customization and program implementation aligned with the unique learning needs of groups underrepresented in the labour market, as well as the job performance needs of major sectors of the Canadian economy.
Start-end date: December 2021 - September 2022
Sponsor: Employment and Social Development Canada
Educational, Labour Market and Demographic Characteristics of Indigenous Peoples and Racialized Canadians
This project uses Canada-wide survey data from the Longitudinal International Study of Adults and potentially other surveys to generate in-depth knowledge to support education policy, including answers to the following questions: What are the educational attainment levels and institution types Indigenous and racialized Canadians attend, and how do they compare over time and with non-Indigenous and non-racialized Canadians? What are the fields of study and occupations that Indigenous and racialized Canadians pursue, compared with non-Indigenous and non-racialized Canadians? What are the sources of funding used by Indigenous and racialized Canadians to pursue PSE, compared with non-Indigenous and non-racialized Canadians? What barriers do Indigenous and racialized Canadians face in pursuing further education and training? Do they differ from those faced by non-Indigenous and non-racialized Canadians? What are the characteristics of Indigenous and racialized Canadians who face barriers to further education and training? Do the characteristics of those with barriers to further education and training (unmet learning need or want) differ from those with no unmet need or want? What are the labour market outcomes and earnings of Indigenous and racialized Canadians, compared with non-Indigenous and non-racialized Canadians? and Are there certain types of life events over time that correlate to (re-)entry into PSE and training for Indigenous and racialized Canadians, and do they differ from those faced by non-Indigenous and non-racialized Canadians?
Start-end date: November 2021 - March 2022
Sponsor: Employment and Social Development Canada
Building Capacity through an Anti-Oppression Lens
This research project An Anti-oppression Framework to Combat Systemic Racism in Settlement Services is designed to test the use of Anti-Oppression Approaches (AOP) to build capacity of immigrant-serving agencies to recognize and combat systemic racism in the sector. The project will engage immigrant-serving agencies in Metro Vancouver to increase their front-line practitioner and leadership’s awareness, recognition, and understanding of anti-oppression in settlement services at the systemic level through 1) workshops and 2) coaching and mentoring. The Centre for Anti-Oppressive Communication will lead the development and implementation of the training. The evaluation is designed to learn not just about training participants’ experience with the project activities and the resulting skills acquisition, but also the outcomes — what did participants actively change at multiple levels — institutionally, interpersonally, and individually.
Start-end date: November 2021 - March 2024
Sponsor: S.U.C.C.E.S.S. – Tri-cities Local Immigration Partnership
