On February 7th, 2024, at Centennial College Event Centre, around 170 attendees gathered for the TEQ LIP’s BRIDGES 2024 Forum. This annual event brings together service providers from across the GTA to discuss innovative strategies and ideas to support newcomers. The forum included diverse speakers, thought leaders and trailblazing thinkers who shared new approaches to designing, delivering and developing partnerships to meet the changing and emerging needs in the settlement sector.
This year’s theme was “Innovating Service Design, Delivery, and Partnerships to Support Newcomers in a Challenging Socioeconomic Landscape”. This theme aimed to look at the dynamic ways service providers were responding and supporting newcomers in a time of unprecedented and rising social and economic challenges being faced by newcomers and the settlement sector in the GTA.
TNLIP and TEQLIP collaborated to facilitate one of 4 workshops. This workshop focused on leveraging AI in the settlement sector to serve diverse sub-populations and those most vulnerable. Speakers included Radhika Sharma from Skills for Change, as well as folks from CCS and ACCES’s AI Chatbot project, and WESO who focus on effectively evaluating hybrid programming in the settlement sector. The workshop was one that captured the interest of many and was a successful learning opportunity for attendees on how technology can benefit the settlement sector.
