Community Immigration Retention and Rural Ontario

Community Immigrant Retention in Rural Ontario (CIRRO) is designed to respond to the rural communities' growing need to deal with the issue of human capital decline. The project seeks to undertake collaborative research with rural communities to build immigrant attraction capacity based on best practices modeling and dissemination; and knowledge sharing. The project will enhance the capacity of the selected communities to attract, integrate and retain newcomers to Ontario to sustain their economic growth. A bottom-up approach will be utilized, in which community leaders learn collectively and set realistic goals given their social, cultural and economic needs, strengths and challenges. It will further catalyze a referral mechanism between urban settlement organizations and small town centres who may be seeking to attract specific skills. Dialoguing and developing partnerships with stakeholders and settlement service providers are essential components of CIRRO.

A Window of Opportunity Presentation [PDF format - 704 kb; html format]

Newsletter [PDF format - 308kb; html format ]

Case Study Communities

City of Chatham-Kent

City of Brockville

City of North Bay

The CIRRO initiative web page is under construction. More information on the CIRRO will follow soon. Thank you for your interest in this initiative. If you have any questions or require more information please contact:

Magdy ElDakiky, PhD
Rural Community Economic Development Branch
Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs
1Stone Rd. West, 4th NW
Guelph, ON
N1G 4Y2

Phone: (519) 837-6396