Twenty-second International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

Canada and many other countries offer permanent resettlement to a limited number of refugees each year. In 2017, Canada received 44,000 refugees who were resettled as permanent residents. Due to rising conflict in many parts of the world, a notable increase in the number of refugees to Canada is expected. Although permanent resettlement allows for immigrants and refugees to live in a safer place, they must still cope with any premigration traumatic experiences, as well as the hardships of establishing a new life in a different social and cultural environment. For young people, these challenges are often intensified as they work to overcome major school adjustments, social challenges, and acculturative stress. In Canada, most mental health agencies heavily focus their services for refugee and immigrant youth on enhancing resilience in response to trauma. Despite the agencies’ focus on resilience, there have not been efforts to upstream measures and policy that enhance refugee and immigrant youth’s resilience. Resiliency of refugee and immigrant youth is often associated with their assimilation into the Western culture such as learning the dominant language and integrating into the dominant culture. This conceptualization of resiliency is insensitive to cultural, religious, and social factors that contextualize their definition of resilience. This research focuses on the preliminary findings of a quantitative study that explored how resilience is conceptualized and assessed for refugee and immigrant youth and their experiences with mental health services and interventions which are geared towards fostering resilience in Montreal.