Promise of Home: A Narrative Model for Achieving Immigrant Retention in New Brunswick

The Promise of Home is a community-based narrative research project on newcomer experiences of belonging in Fredericton, New Brunswick, which began in 2019. Recently, many research and policy initiatives have been focused on issues related to immigration retention (McDonald and Miah; McDonald et al.). Our study proposes that barriers to community building can be overcome not only by immigration programs driven by the social and economic needs of the host communities, but also by meeting the needs of newcomers. We focus on a holistic, ground-up approach to sedentarizing immigrants through incorporating the stories of both recent immigrants and other Frederictonians, to aid in restructuring settlement policies. Promise of Home pursues this approach through four phases of inquiry that embrace Fredericton as a place where immigrant youths aspire to belong, immigrant families find a sense of home, people share hopes of building a more inclusive community, and these aspirations inform effective grassroots policies. On a practical level, our study and analysis involve storytelling, performances, a visioning retreat, a Web-based collection of stories and visions, town-hall meetings, and policy workshops. These activities are used to develop community-driven recommendations regarding newcomer integration, accessibility to social services, and immigrant retention. Ultimately, we seek to enhance these activities through a model that will be replicable for other communities in the province. This invited essay briefly describes the context in which the project was created and implemented, its methodology, goals, and preliminary results.