LEADERSHIP REPORT

Allison Pond, Executive Director	Anthony McNamee, Chairperson

Twenty-five years ago, ACCES opened in a small downtown Toronto office with a $100,000 budget and 8 employees who dedicated themselves to helping nearly 2,000 new Canadians find their first job in Canada. Since then, we’ve expanded our Toronto services, opened 4 more locations in Scarborough, Mississauga, Brampton and North York, increased our budget to over $13 million and grown our workforce to over 130 employees who work tirelessly to achieve our mission and connect over 16,000 job seekers a year to employers across the GTA.

We have come a long way since that single downtown office and our accomplishments are a result of our expertise, the belief we have in our mission and our commitment to the strategic planning priorities we’ve set for ourselves since the beginning. These priorities are the building blocks of our organization. They have allowed us to continually re-evaluate our services so we can easily adapt and respond to emerging needs in our communities. Together with our community partners, our employers and our sponsors, we’ve made incredible progress over the past 25 years, increasing access to meaningful employment for those we serve. Today, our services are needed more than ever as growing skills shortages increase the need to attract skilled immigrants to Canada’s workplaces. However, there is still work to do newcomers to Canada continue to face barriers to employment including a lack of recognition of their education and credentials, myths about no “Canadian work experience,” discrimination and few professional networks.

At ACCES, we’ve always recognized that to pursue our mission effectively, deliver service excellence and create professional opportunities for our clients, we needed a solid foundation - a strong, responsive organization. Our Board of Directors has set this direction and led this vision. Our board members are not only our guides, they are fully engaged in our work and in the delivery of our mission. Over the years, the doors they’ve opened have been instrumental to our growth and our progress. Our motivated and committed leadership team and staff have implemented the plans. They’ve built the infrastructure and laid the foundation for the delivery of effective services that have helped thousands of job seekers.

Something else we know is that service excellence depends on the continuous evaluation, revision and improvement of our programs and our organization. We are very thankful for the ongoing support of the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities (MTCU) and their visionary performance management based funding model for allowing us to put service excellence and successful results for our clients at the forefront of everything we do.

We learned early on that in order to connect our skilled clients to the right employers, we needed to understand not only the skills our clients had to offer, but also the specific needs of our employers and their particular industry. The support of the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration (MCI) and Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) has allowed us to do this - to integrate unique sector-specific bridge training programs into our core Employment Ontario services. The bridge training model provides: employment consultants who prepare participants for their unique sector-specific job search; educational and industry experts who train program participants with skills they will need for success in the sector in Canada; industry employer advisors who guide the direction and development of the program, and job developers who become sector experts. These key people build essential relationships with individual employers, and engage sector-specific industries in working with us to open the right doors to the labour market. For internationally trained professionals, our bridge training programs have been extremely successful and are key for us to truly achieve our mission.

Over our 25 years, we have always used innovation to strengthen and expand the impact of our core work. We created Talk English Cafés® at all our sites for clients to practise essential workplace communications skills. Our unique post-hire supports, added to our bridging programs, support career mobility and ongoing success for immigrants once they are hired. We’ve also added Workplace Communication Advantage™, a fee-for-service stream that we offer directly to GTA employers who are looking for communications training to support their internationally trained employees. Most recently, our reach into the employer community has expanded tremendously with the introduction of SpeedMentoring®. Since 2006, we have hosted hundreds of Speed Mentoring® sessions, engaging employers and expanding the networks of newcomers by bringing the two together in an interactive, high-intensity setting. Candidates are inspired by the advice they receive from professionals in their industry and they have a renewed sense of energy to bring to their search for employment. Employers are so impressed with the candidates they meet face-to-face during these sessions that many of the barriers to hiring actually melt away. This year, we held our first large-scale SpeedMentoring® event at the Toronto Board of Trade with more than 120 mentors from 65 companies and 120 mentees. Again, thank you to our Speed Mentoring®sponsor BMO Financial Group for helping make it a great success.

Over the past 25 years, we’ve learned that ACCES services can be further strengthened through effective collaboration. We therefore continue to invest energy and commitment to teaming up with our extensive network of community partners, including the Consortium of Agencies Serving Internationally Trained Persons (CASIP), the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC), the Ontario Network of Employment Skills Training Projects (ONESTEP), the Peel Newcomer Strategy Group and the Local Immigration Partnerships (LIPS). Our partners share our vision of fair access and of integrated and locally coordinated services for immigrants. We know that if we plan and work together, we can offer skilled immigrants a continuum of services that support them in entering the Canadian labour market into sustainable work in their field. At the same time, we also know that together, we are better able to serve our employers by offering a single point of access across the GTA.

For 25 years at ACCES, we have always stayed true to our mission and focused on building a strong organization to support the services we deliver. These are two simple things that are at the core of our success. They enable us to stay on top of an ever changing labour market and to connect our clients to meaningful, professional work. We are extremely proud of the work we do and to belong to a sector that plays such a vital role in the economic and social well-being of so many Ontarians.

Board of Directors

Anthony McNamee (Chairperson), Deloitte
Dauna Jones-Simmonds (Vice-Chair), Aon Hewitt
Christopher Barnes (Secretary), Honeywell
Leon Chin (Treasurer) Ernst and Young LLP
Chia-yi Chua, McCarthy Tétrault LLP
Gayle Takahashi, George Brown College
John Shields, Ryerson University
Keith Hernandez, KAH Consultants
Anu Vittal, The Bean Bag Factory Inc.
Kim Stevens , TD Bank Group

 Executive

Allison Pond, Executive Director
Irene Sihvonen, Senior Director, Services and Organizational  Development
Manjeet Dhiman, Senior Director, Services and Business Development
Sue Sadler, Senior Director of Services, Peel Region