Employment fair to help find jobs for inner city residents
June 29, 2016. Employers are gathering at Bissell Centre East Wednesday morning as part of Take Action: Bissell Centre’s Inner City Employment Fair. In attendance will be Rogers Place, PCL Construction, Labour Ready, Red Rock Camps, A&W, Metis Nation of Alberta, and Red Robin to provide job opportunities for people struggling with poverty in the inner city of Edmonton. The job fair comes at a time when the employment outlook is on a downturn in the city and across the province. The main focus of the Inner City Employment Fair is to alleviate poverty by finding people jobs and help remove challenges associated with homelessness, a diminished quality of life, being a temporary foreign worker, or the struggles with transitioning from a reserve to the city, which unemployed people face in the inner city when looking for work. “We see so many barriers to sustainable employment that others may not see. We thought if we could make our employment fair a simple, friendly, and approachable environment, we could knock some of the barriers down,” said Brett Dermott, business development officer with Bissell Centre.
Frontier College to offer summer literacy camps in Alberta
June 29, 2016. Frontier College will be offering summer, literacy camps in Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Labrador, and Nunavut. The camps will employ over 330 youth, many hired from the host community. Parents, Elders, and community members are invited to participate and share traditional stories, culture and language activities with the children. In a press release, Frontier College says it recognizes its responsibility and role in contributing towards efforts at reconciliation as outlined in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Final Report and Calls to Action. The Aboriginal Summer Literacy Camps advances a number of the TRC’s recommendations, including helping to close the educational attainment gaps between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children. Through a daily routine of individual and group reading, journaling, games, cooking, arts and crafts, science experiments, and field trips, children aged five to15 will explore the many ways words, numbers, and ideas are used in their daily lives. Frontier College will also distribute over 25,000 new books to campers and communities this summer. Frontier College began offering Aboriginal Summer Literacy Camps in 2005, and to date, over 43,000 children and youth have attended camps.