Our Organization The Canadian Coalition for Immigrant Children and Youth (CCICY) is an adhoc, voluntary organization. Growing concern over a lack of the crucial services for immigrant children and youth has revealed a clear need for collaborative efforts to make impacts on policy and practice at the national, provincial and local levels. Since the first CCICY meeting of volunteers in March, 2005, we have developed a group of about 400 individuals from across Canada who want to be associated with this initiative. The group includes faculty members from various disciplines in many Canadian universities; school teachers, administrators, and school trustees; NGOs in the settlement, education and community service sectors, and policy makers from various levels of government.

Our Aim

The Canadian Coalition for Children and Youth advocates for more; better; and better coordinated services to meet the unique needs of immigrant children and youth in Canada. Our focus is on young people, under the age of 21, who are immigrants or refugees to Canada and/or children who mainly speak a language at home other than English, French or a Canadian Aboriginal language.

The CCICY has a vision of contributing to the goal enunciated by Michaëlle Jean, Governor-General of Canada (Aug. 4, 2005), "Today's Canada has more voices than before-each calling out to be heard, to be respected and to be understood....I want individuals in Canada to be more than just told that they are included. They have to know and experience what Canada means to them and to be able to participate in all this country has to offer."

Our Approach
The need for collaboration at all levels on this issue is urgent. The Canadian Coalition for Immigrant Children and Youth works to bring together the knowledge and experience of groups of interested parties, such as immigrant communities, schools, ethnic specific and general agencies, researchers from many disciplines, and representatives from all levels of government to share information, set priorities, and work towards collaborative solutions to the issue of neglect of ICY needs. We seek solutions collaboratively through our individual and organizational members and outreach other institutions.

We aim to:

1. Be a catalyst for collection and analysis of research and service-based knowledge from multidisciplinary and multisectoral sources with the aim of supporting direct action;
2. Create opportunities for collaborative information sharing and decision-making;
3. Identify priority areas for change;
4. Provide outreach to involve new partners;
5. Develop the basis for specific development projects and pursue separate funding for these projects;
6. Provide the basis for direct support to service providers through networking and information sharing;
7. Foster innovation among stakeholders by identifying crucial gaps and bringing knowledge from research and best practice to bear on the problems; and
8. Support federal, provincial and local policy making processes through knowledge from research and practice.

The Need
Constant high immigration to Canada since 1946, and expanding diversity of origins of immigrants since the 1970s has resulted in quickly growing numbers of immigrant children and youth, their proportion in the population, and the ways in which they differ from the rest of their age group in Canada.
They tend to be concentrated in a few major cities across Canada, and recently, many live in neighbourhoods of high immigrant density within those cities.
Also, many live in poverty. The unique characteristics and needs of each immigrant group and individual immigrant child is challenging the basis of services for them whether they form a large group locally or are very few within a local population. As a result, current low levels and quality of service are significantly disadvantaging immigrant children and youth relative to their non-immigrant counterparts. Measures of school success, especially dropout rates, indicate that immigrant children and youth are falling behind their peers in education.

Our Activities
We have used e-mail and local no-cost meetings to:

• Establish ad hoc working groups in most provinces;
• Collect data from most provinces on provincial policies for English as a second language programming in schools and teacher qualifications;
• Start data collection on best practice examples in school-related and community programs for ICY funded outside direct schooling;
• Identify experts interested in specific projects (e.g., identifying best practices, planning development of initial assessment and evaluation tools, and framing appropriate teacher training);
• Start a review of the literature from research and practice with a list of priority areas of concern;
• Lobby and raise public awareness in government election campaigns;
  Raise awareness of issues at conferences of teachers and other professionals;
• Make depositions to provincial and other bodies making decisions about immigration issues.