Proactive Community Outreach
Proactive Community Outreach (PCO) is IOS’s organic and culturally salient proactive and assertive community outreach model, providing services at their homes or where refugees and immigrants feel safe. The IOS PCO programs empower the East African community with effective outreach tactics. They engage and inspire community members to create meaningful change.
Psychosocial Well-Being
As children grow into teenagers, they experience many unique changes. Physiological, cognitive, psychological, and emotional changes during their transition into adulthood can contribute to great frustration. It is not always a smooth transition as they become more susceptible to their environment and possessive and negative influences.
Settlement and Integration Support
Our Settlement and Integration Programs provide services to help refugees and immigrants navigate the settlement and integration challenges often experienced by refugees and immigrants. These include timely, culturally competent, responsive settlement services, housing applications, household furniture support, and translation.
Youth Program
As children grow into teenagers, they experience many unique changes. Physiological, cognitive, psychological, and emotional changes during their transition into adulthood can contribute to great frustration. It is not always a smooth transition as they become more susceptible to their environment and possessive and negative influences.
Policy Influencing and Advocacy
Our Policy Influencing and Advocacy programs have focused on the fundamental basic right to see black refugees and immigrants access critical health and psychosocial services without structural and institutional barriers as well as discriminatory practices.
Senior Active Living Program (SALP)
The Senior Active Living Program (SALP) supports older refugees and immigrants with creative and culturally innovative strategies to provide emotional and social support, social inclusion, and community involvement.
Gender-Based Violence (GBV)
Our Gender-Based Violence (GBV) Program provides support to individuals who are at risk or are victims of intimate partner and domestic violence. A greater number of East Africans adhere to traditional gender norms due to the patriarchal cultures that exist in the region. These facets heighten the possibility of intimate partners and domestic violence.
Immigrant Outreach Crisis Response (IOCR)
Immigrant Outreach Crisis Response (IOCR) project has been supporting refugees and ethnic minorities from East Africa by providing trauma-informed, multiculturally sensitive, and language-specific crisis response, post-crisis follow-up, brief community-based individual and group counseling, proactive and assertive community mental health outreach programs, domestic violence interventions, and gender-based violence response.
Porridge With Love
The time during and after pregnancy is one of the most vulnerable periods in a woman’s life. Extreme hormonal fluctuations coupled with physical and social changes can take a toll on the mother’s mental health.
Training and Workshops
Our IOCR provides trauma-informed and safe urgent mental health and psychosocial response, intervention, stabilization, and consultation. We have been collaborating with the City of Calgary to provide these services.