Our History

There have, indeed, been a number of recent initiatives undertaken to explore the experiences and challenges that immigrants, ethnocultural, and mainstream disability communities face when settling into Canadian society.

These initiatives have identified the challenges to include finding a home (housing needs), finding a job or starting a business (employment needs), placing kids into schools and/or obtaining the Canadian educational or professional accreditation (educational needs), and the general challenges of cultural adjustment to the Canadian milieu (e.g., establishing new friendships, finding a place for worship, grocery shopping, recreation, etc.).

On top of these pressures, however, immigrants with disabilities and disabled ethnocultural communities face additional burdens arising out of the fact of their disability and cultural minority backgrounds. As such, the challenges and experiences of this population cannot be addressed within the exclusive context of either the disability framework or the multicultural framework. 

Yet, government policies and initiatives continue to emanate from the application of such analytical frameworks. As a consequence, government actions to address the needs of the ethnocultural disability community have failed to make a significant positive impact on the quality of life of people with disabilities from the ethnocultural and aboriginal communities.

In order to remedy this, The Canadian Multicultural Disability Centre (INC), in
collaboration with its partners, will be undertaking this initiative to explore how a more
rigorous analytical framework, which combines both the disability and multicultural
approaches, might facilitate policy and programmatic responses that are better suited to making a real, positive difference for Canada’s disabled ethnocultural communities.

For further questions about the Canadian Multicultural Disability Centre (INC) please feel free to get in touch with us.