Navigating New Spaces: An Evaluation of ISANS' Youth Life Skills Support Program

Resettlement entails orientation across intersecting spaces: the personal, the familial, the social, the economic, and cultural. In each, refugee youth encounter challenges and opportunities, many of which are unique relative to those of their adult-counterparts. And yet, taking the “family” as the unit of resettlement, many services obscure the unique needs of refugee youth. This tendency is not anomalous; rather, it is consistent with a social, economic, and political context that defines successful integration in economics terms. Following from this, adults (as breadwinners) are often the recipients of supportive services that, in turn, prioritize employment. Increasingly, however, front-line agencies are aware of the social requirements of successful resettlement, as well as the critical role of youth in supporting the family resettlement. In response, the Immigrant Services Association of Nova Scotia (ISANS) has developed and implemented the Youth Life Skills Support Program (LSS), which aims to establish a groundwork for the well-being of refugee youth in Nova Scotia across a range of registers, remedying the traditional focus on refugee adults. Partnered with ISANS, this study takes LSS as its focus. Since 2013, 190 Government Assisted Refugee youth, ages 15-25, have participated in LSS, which provides group orientation, links youth to programming, and matches them with a peer mentor. Refugee youth themselves, mentors are causal ISANS staff who, trained in peer support, help newcomer GAR-youth navigate the complexities of initial resettlement. Recently, LSS has expanded to include in-house workshops on financial literacy; Canadian law; volunteerism; transportation; stress management; relationship building; and intergenerational conflict. Though evidenced by participant feedback, LSS’ success has not been comprehensively demonstrated. This project has overarching two objectives. (1) Responsive to the Program’s need for a systemized evaluation, our first objective is to redress this gap with an account of LSS, reflective of the youth’s experiences, an assessment of its outcomes for both GAR-participants and peer mentors, and insight into how it might be strengthened. (2) Reflecting the project’s broader research objective and anticipated contributions to the scholarship, this project will provide insight into the experiences of GAR-youth in Halifax, Nova Scotia (an understudied site of refugee resettlement) as they navigate manifold connected spaces of integration—the social, the economic, the political, and the cultural. Given LSS’ peer support approach, the Program offers a unique opportunity to explore the experiences of refugee youth in Halifax at distinct, yet, connected moments in in time, corresponding to the initial resettlement period (clients) and several years later (mentors), as well as to the ways in which refugee youth are able to support each other through the resettlement process.


Co-investigators: Dr. Catherine Bryan, Serperi Sevgur, and Temitope Abiagom