We came away from the ACS – Metropolis Institute‘s #Identities Summit thinking about the distance between being counted, being seen and being cared for and how the data and evidence we produce can widen or close that distance. That distance is where so much of our work at Generation1.ca lives. Thank you Jack Jedwab James Ondrick Chloe Peel Ahmed Hussein, corinne prince and the entire team for such a fabulous last week. Enjoyed connecting and reconnecting with so many familiar and new faces and I have so many stories to tell from the so many different insights we bumped into, cracked open, and even cajoled.
I sit in industry as its Founder and CEO, an immigrant, and an insights, research and data leader. My work connects research design, community knowledge and evidence to decisions about professional settlement and workforce opportunity and upskilling. Inequity concerns me because I see how it travels: through access to opportunity, through representation, and into the data we use to understand people’s lives.
Who gets included? What do we ask? Which assumptions survive scrutiny? Whose experiences disappear when findings become recommendations? These are questions equally of data quality and talent leadership, with consequences for the people our decisions reach whether we hire, serve, or do business with them.
Who I am then both matters and does not matter. My identity informs what I notice, just as yours may inform what you notice. But it should not become a box that determines everything others believe about either of us. That tension runs through our work: how do we tailor pathways to people’s advancement without clumping them into broad categories or stereotypes? How do we recognize shared barriers while making room for very different ambitions?
“Inclusivity,” particularly in its Western institutional language, has always felt too broad and abstract. Across cultures, there are more organic expressions of it: seeing, listening, welcoming, doing. Recognizing an obligation to one another. How much of the language we adopt translates into the care we practice?
Across the summit, peers and fellow leaders expressed frustration with systemic apathy in employment, organizations and settlement services. Systems can make indifference routine. Individuals reproduce it through everyday decisions, assumptions and blind spots.
Our Global Industry Skills Study’s Immigrant Futures Wave gives that frustration some shape. Among the Future Ready Innovators cohort of 156 Generation1.ca members surveyed, 38% reported observing or experiencing bias as immigrant professionals; another 23% were unsure. Job interviewers, colleagues, peers and supervisors featured among the reported sources. The places where people seek opportunity are also places where they encounter exclusion.
Asked what changes would make North America more inclusive for immigrants, 73% selected better access to jobs and career advancement, while 36% selected stronger anti-discrimination laws and policies protecting immigrant rights. Elsewhere in another question about, respondents sought networking opportunities (77%), job placement services (73%) and mentorship (60%).
Read together, these findings connect opportunity with the conditions needed to pursue it. People are asking for connections, practical pathways and fair treatment. Our professional settlement supports must respond to all three. People can keep investing in themselves and still encounter barriers they cannot individually overcome.
On the employer side, well supported by Fuse Insights , Unlock Surveys , Generation1.ca our GISS 2026 survey found that 30% of the 520 employers surveyed reported having no formal immigrant supports in place. Alongside immigrants’ calls for connections, career pathways and fair treatment, this reveals how much work remains to turn inclusion into everyday workplace practice.
As a researcher, I also have a responsibility to distinguish what our community’s responses reveal from what we can claim about a wider population. Community evidence gives us depth, questions to investigate and experiences to act on. Its value grows when we are transparent about whose voices it captures and whose we still need to hear.
For racialized immigrant women, even deciding how much of ourselves to bring into a professional interaction can become work. We navigate identity, credibility and belonging while anticipating when our experiences might get dismissed as “identity politics.” That balancing act carries an emotional, mental and physical cost. More of us does not automatically mean more of us are seen or afforded the same trust and respect by the masses.
Building Generation1.ca, now in its eleventh year, has meant returning to these tensions with people willing to help turn what we learn into something others can use: a connection, a career opportunity, a learning experience, a platform for a story that deserves to travel further.
Our members are knowledge holders, professionals, learners, entrepreneurs, artists, mechanics, scientists, collaborators and people opening doors for others. Their experiences shape our research. Their ambitions stretch our programming. Our organizational members and partners help expand what we can deliver together. Their trust makes us accountable for what happens after the findings are presented.
For me, data leadership carries that responsibility across the whole research process: how we design a study, build relationships, interpret uncertainty, communicate findings and follow through with building products and services informed by the best insight. The quality of our work depends on how thoughtfully those parts connect.
Generation1.ca sits at the intersection of professional settlement, community and upskilling, powered by data, insights and storytelling that shape all our programming. From that vantage point when I spoke to fellow leaders in the ecosystem, I insisted that settlement must keep learning from other professions and industries to better understand people’s journeys, respond when services fail, and earn trust and anticipate changing needs in the face of disruptions.
We also need the judgment to recognize when a cultural broker can help, when another expert should intervene, and when the institution itself must change. We all have work to do in becoming better at understanding and connecting across cultural worlds. The summit centered identity and ideas of unity, harmony and belonging, yet drew so many people working across immigration and settlement. That connection should stretch our thinking about what settlement becomes and how it has evolved from nothing into a multi-million dollar industry in just a few recent decades. Arrival is one moment in a life that continues through career changes, family responsibilities, uncertainty, reinvention and contributions across borders.
Integration is cyclical and ongoing – nothing good comes of identity that is static. Identity evolves as we rediscover our roots, purpose and passions, and negotiate our place in changing communities. Our policies and services need the capacity to evolve with us, responding to the lives people lead today while preparing for needs that have yet to become visible.
Investing in immigrant wellbeing cannot guarantee protection against discrimination or harsh futures. It can expand people’s choices, strengthen support when things go wrong and create greater accountability for the institutions shaping their opportunities.
If we say we accept different ways of seeing, thinking and believing, how does that commitment show up in our professions, where our decisions carry consequences for someone else’s life? I left Niagara thinking about how Generation1.ca and so many other organizations in the room have been making fairness, transparency and a relentless care for one another’s wellbeing tangible in everyday life. That is how trust the currency of business and social impact is earned and the ecosystem effects show.
This week, as I settle into Mexico for WAPOR ’s annual conference, I carry these questions into my session, “Who Speaks for Transnational Publics?” They have grown alongside Generation1.ca and the people whose lives, relationships and ambitions stretch across borders.
If you’re here, say hello and come to our session! I’ll also be giving a shoutout to #AAPOR’s Global Research Affinity Group too, creating more opportunities to learn across our global research communities. Generation1.ca continues to grow through people who bring their knowledge, care and conviction to this work. I am grateful to keep building it with you and responsible for helping turn what we learn together into what becomes possible next. Learn more: www.generation1.ca – Who Speaks for the Transnational Publics? CEO Presentation at WAPOR in Mexico, October 2026.
Oh, and if our finding that tech readiness is most positively linked to immigrants’ intention to stay sparks your curiosity, join us on December 3 in Ottawa for Future Ready Governance: AI Readiness and Maturity, where we’ll discuss what it takes to turn AI ambition into responsible action. Will you join us? E-mail me! Arundati@generation1.ca, if you have any questions.
