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Leah Mitchell is a praire girl with a passion for helping newcomers reach their professional goals through language and training. She partners with leading Canadian organizations to implement EnGen to recruit, retain, and engage multilingual workers, improving workplace communication, safety, and collaboration.
Lindsay Rubeniuk is equally passionate about prairie towns, rural development, and increasing their skilled workforce. She runs 100th Meridian Development, a boutique workforce firm focusing on immigration services, settlement, and career development assistance.
Together, they host the Move Rural Canada Podcast, where they give a voice to rural and Northern businesses who are looking for employees. Specifically workplaces who want to hire newcomers.
Leah, Lindsay, and I chat about volunteering as a career strategy in rural Canada plus:
What "Canadian experience" actually means
How networking plays out differently in cities versus small towns
Why one volunteer meeting a week beats a thousand online applications
What the first 90 days needs to look like for a newcomer landing in rural Canada
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Chapters
0:00 Rural means different things to different newcomers
0:33 Intro
1:23 Why Leah and Lindsay built their careers in rural Canada
3:51 What most newcomers misunderstand about small town Canada
6:04 What rural actually means in Canada
9:57 Buying a house outside the big cities
15:39 Building community and belonging in rural Canada
20:25 Why volunteering is the real career strategy
26:09 How employers and communities can help newcomers stay
31:21 The newcomer's role in making it work
38:12 The one thing to do in your first 90 days
44:55 Stop applying online, start showing up
1:00:05 Outro
Some takeaways
The conversation about who is responsible for newcomer support and integration has become weirdly binary in Canada. It's either the the federal government failed or it's the employers that failed. What of the community? Workforce integration works best when the newcomer sees the community as home.
The big city default is one of the most expensive habits in immigration. Most newcomers land where everyone they know landed, then spend years competing for the same jobs as every other newcomer in the same city. We often frame the immigration journey as a series of trade-offs, but we often aren't willing to trade off on the allure of the big cities. The reasons why are valid, but what do you really have to lose?
Volunteering in Canada isn’t just a shortcut to finding a job. Think of it as a parallel system through which Canadians prove their worth while contributing to the society. If you frame is as a transaction, don't be surprised if it doesn't work for you. Show up, do the work, and the references and friendships and job leads show up later as byproducts.
Links
Where to find Leah and Lindsay:
The Newcomers resources
Want to work with us? Check out The Newcomers Media Kit.
Want more immigrant interviews? Listen to The Newcomers Podcast.
Looking to find out what Canadian immigration program you’re eligible for? Check out our Who’s Eligible For series.
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