SettlementAtWork:Website
From SettlementAtWork
| Organization: | OCASI |
|---|---|
| Contact: | atwork@ocasi.org |
| Started in: | 2003 |
Contents |
Project Overview
The Settlement At Work project is dedicated to increasing the capacity of those involved in the settlement sector to raise their resilience, responsiveness and quality of services for Newcomers. The project aims to share knowledge, best practices and innovative approaches for service delivery. The Settlement At Work sites are managed by the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants.
The Settlement AtWork website has professional development resources and news for front-line workers, program staff, managers and administrative staff. Our goal is to help workers prepare to best serve their newcomer clients, and to help organizations support their staff.
Last year (2010), we had more than 400,000 visits to the site, and almost 1 million page views. 70% of our site visitors are repeat users who come back for the news and resources that we update daily.
This year (2011) we have launched a wiki, complete with over 650 articles that users can review and update or create their own. As wikis have seen explosive growth in scale and capacity to support these aims, organisations and communities of practitioners, the Settlement At Work wiki supports collaboration and openness for the settlement sector of Ontario, and beyond.
Frequent visits to the Settlement AtWork website mean that agency staff are knowledgeable about the trends, information and opportunities that affect our daily work.
Latest newsThe Settlement At Work site is being redesigned into two sites:
More information about these sites below. |
Transition
Essentially the site is being split between two sites. All resources ("Research", "Assisting Clients" and "Assisting Staff") have been moved to this new wiki. News, Job postings, Event listings and RFPs are being implemented in a new "Listings" site, with functionality to make this operation more dynamic. Added to this section is a SettlementAtWork:Blog for new regular content to support the settlement sector.
Listings site
The listings site is accessible at the main SettlementAtWork website address. It links to various sections, with prominent placement for a link to the SettlementAtWork wiki.
The site has the following listings:
- News
- News, announcements and developments relevant to the settlement sector of Ontario
- Jobs
- Job listings for settlement sector of Ontario
- Events
- Events happening in Ontario relevant to the settlement sector.
- RFPs (Request for Proposals)
- RFPs for contracts for work on projects relevant to the settlement sector of Ontario.
The SettlementAtWork listings site posts content that is authoritatively collected and checked for relevance. The information may have been gathered from the internet, from email or even have been developed on the wiki. Pages on the wiki may also list various sections or posted content on the listings site as added resources on relevant pages.
Blog section
Implemented later, the blog will feature articles about capacity building in the settlement sector of Ontario.
Platform
The listings site is built on WordPress using a custom-developed template.
Current status
This site is now live. http://www.settlementatwork.org
Benefits
The new site will have the following benefits over the old (existing) site:
- Updated design: sleeker and nicer and more in line with the new AtWork branding;
- Blog! There is a blog;
- RSS: Visitors can subscribe to the RSS feed for the site;
- Feedburner: Users can subscribe to the site and receive an email update when a blog post is added;
- Centralised news feed: The News feed includes new events, RFPs and job postings;
- Branding with other OCASI sites, with links to Settlement.Org, the main OCASI site, InMyLanguage and NewYouth;
- Twitter integration: Listing of either tweets from the new @SetAtWork twitter account and/or a Hashtag feed.
Wiki
The wiki is the repository for all resource information relevant to the settlement sector of Ontario. All articles can be edited by any registered user, to be kept up-to-date, made more relevant, or have more information added. Also, users can create new content of their own, upload files, create their own user page, and more.
The wiki helps position SettlementAtWork to be the knowledge hub of the settlement sector of Ontario without excluding external development or sharing of information. With this horizontal, collaborative approach, SettlementAtWork supports the sector to collaborate, and broaden the reach of this information.
The SettlementAtWork.Org site provides professional development information for frontline workers and managers of immigrant-serving organizations. The goal is to strengthen connections between actors int he settlement sector to share knowledge, best practices and insights into innovative service delivery.
The listing of resource information is in 3 areas:
- Assisting Clients: serve your clients with the most up to date skills and techniques available, including counselling, serving specific communities, information and referral and more.
- Assisting Staff: dealing with workplace issues, including conflict, stress, policies, human resource management. Access to funding and program-specific resources.
- Research: a collection of studies, guides and insightful reports related to the settlement sector of ONtario.
This resource is an attempt to describe the dimensions of settlement work and to provide tools that can be used to train workers to be effective settlement counsellors. It is a training guide, not a source of answers to all the challenging questions related to settlement counselling. The emphasis is on processes that trainers can use to initiate introspection and animate group discussion on these issues. For many of the questions there are no final answers, because of the complex nature of the settlement process and the cultural dimension of every issue. The assumption is that participants in this type of training, given stimulating activities, will come up with important insights from their own collective experiences.
It is also a professional development and lifelong learning guide. This site will constantly highlight new and innovative information and resources to help you do your work more effectively.
Many of the resources will come from the immigrant-serving sector itself; information you and your colleagues have created that all service providers will find useful. Many resources will highlight the best and most relevant resources from other service sectors. Our goal is to provide you with a portal to resources that you will find useful in your continuous learning and upgrading process.
The resources we highlight for you will meet certain criteria. They will:
- improve the way information and services are provided to newcomers
- strengthen the knowledge and expertise of agencies and individual workers and managers
- increase the productivity of agencies and individual workers
- enhance communication and collaboration within the sector
This site provides an electronic community where agencies and workers can find announcements, information about current issues or projects, find answers to frequently asked questions and access a database of online documents.
Platform
The wiki is built using Mediawiki, the same software that runs Wikipedia.
See also
The SettlementAtWork portal page, page used as a dashboard of various Settlement At Work projects.
