Research Library

CCIS Family Violence Specialist and Apartment 1310 Developmental Evaluation Report January 2019

Abstract

Calgary Catholic Immigration Society (CCIS) is a non-profit organization with expertise in providing settlement and integration services to immigrants and refugees. The Family and Children’s Services (FCS) Division of CCIS has specific expertise in facilitating the integration of families and children into the community, enhancing the provision of services to newcomers by community resources, and promoting the healthy development of children using a holistic strengths-based approach. The Cultural Brokerage Program designed and facilitated through the FCS Division of CCIS provides direct supports, services and referrals to newcomer families involved with Children’s Services with the aim of ensuring newcomer children are safe and families are able to flourish in Canada. Since its inception, evaluation of the Cultural Brokerage Program has revealed that the most prevalent concern leading to Children’s Services involvement amongst newcomer families is family violence. At the same time, research and experience have shown that newcomer families experience significant barriers to accessing the mainstream family violence support services available in the community. In response to the specific challenges faced by newcomer families with family violence concerns and Children’s Services involvement, in 2017 and 2018 CCIS began implementing practice-based innovative programming as an extension of the proven Cultural Brokerage Program. The Family Violence (FV) Specialist is a resource for the Cultural Brokerage Program team to access when families are facing issues related to family violence. This new team member supports families in understanding the impacts of family violence, responses to family violence, expectations around family violence in Canada, and community resources available. Recognizing that families often face hardship when a period of family separation is needed to address family violence, and in an effort to decrease the burden placed on victims of family violence who are often encouraged to flee violent situations and stay in a women’s shelter, the Apartment 1310 Program offers temporary accommodation, counselling, referrals and supports for perpetrators of family violence from newcomer families involved with Children’s Services. This innovative approach to supporting newcomer families with family violence issues supports the unique goals and desires of newcomer families and provides an opportunity to work directly with perpetrators to create long-term behaviour change. The addition of an FV Specialist to the Cultural Brokerage Program team in 2017 and the establishment of the Apartment 1310 Program in 2018 has advanced CCIS’ responsiveness to family violence concerns amongst newcomer families and is contributing to innovation in the family violence response sector. Given that the FV Specialist and the Apartment 1310 Program are new approaches to addressing family violence amongst newcomer families, CCIS has engaged external evaluation experts at Constellation Consulting Group to evaluate the implementation and impacts of this programming. Using a developmental evaluation approach to capture emergent learnings and provide a continuous feedback loop alongside program innovation, important learnings have been garnered. Since the establishment of FV Specialist role in the spring of 2017, key output statistics have been tracked through the evaluation to ensure the mandate of supporting newcomer families with education, referrals and supports to address violence in the home is being met.