It does. One thing I did not mention is that I also work for Huron County Economic Development, so a portion of my time is spent with economic development issues.
The immigration partnership looks at everything but the attraction piece for newcomers to the region, whereas economic development—that hat—is more about attracting people to the region. We've worked with employers on all aspects of how to attract them to our community, retain and keep them, and how to get involved in that settlement area.
We've been running a very successful working group with the immigration partnership—we call it an employer round table—that brings them together to talk about HR issues. This invariably looks at how to hire a new workforce—meaning the newcomer population—and encourages them to change their policies and practices to be more inclusive of newcomers, whether it's changing their application forms or the interview process.
We're trying to fill the void of that community connections piece, creating more wraparound supports in the workplace. This includes family members in social outings and programming and being cognizant of some of those language barriers and what they can do to work around them. We do have newcomers with very low levels of English, but many employers have managed to successfully hire them in the workplace—and safely.