We would also like to share some promising practices that we have implemented and evaluated over the years.
The Calgary Immigrant Women's Association is the only immigrant-serving agency in Calgary that has been providing culturally sensitive, customized and clinical services to address family violence in immigrant families. Our programs work in collaboration with all other service providers in the city, the provincial government, and shelters. Over the decades and years, we have enhanced and improved our services to ensure our response is effective and in line with positive integration support. The success rates for immigrant families that come to us are extremely high, due to the fact that our services are holistic and customized for each individual family that comes to us. We are excited and proud to say that the majority of our families have no repeated instances of family violence after they go through interventions provided by CIWA.
This holistic approach includes supporting the whole family, not only women but husbands, children, fathers and grandparents; addressing intergenerational conflict in immigrant families; involving men in the process of parenting and in finding solutions to violence, including boys in gender violence education and similar instances.
CIWA provides 40 different programs and services to immediately address root causes that impede integration, including family violence as it relates to poverty, unemployment, homelessness, isolation, and language barriers.
We provide first-language and culturally sensitive support for families. We collaborate with community partners to provide access to clinical supports on top of what we can afford, to enhance the cultural understanding of front-line staff of other agencies that work with immigrants and to provide accessible programs in the neighbourhoods where immigrant families and women live. We provide programs in 120 community locations in Calgary. We provide the reunification support for families that need that kind of support.
So within the range of customized and holistic supports for immigrant families we distinguish intervention and prevention services for immigrant families.
Under the intervention services, we provide family counselling, in-home counselling—