Webinar: Immigrants Wanted! Smart Strategies for Advancing Welcoming Communities and Regional Growth

This webinar is part of a series of Welcoming Cities and Counties webinars co-hosted by Welcoming America.

Join us on October 30 to learn how innovative strategies in St. Louis (US) and Botkyrka (Sweden) aim to attract, recruit and integrate immigrants to jump start regional growth and secure a future of shared prosperity for all.

REGISTER NOW!

Featured Good Ideas

• In St. Louis, the Mosaic Project aims to build “regional prosperity through immigration and innovation.” The municipal government and local partners across all sectors have an ambitious plan to transform the city into the fastest growing region for immigration by 2020 through immigrant recruitment, integration and community engagement.

• In Botkyrka, Sweden’s most ethnically diverse municipality has developed an intercultural strategy which recognizes diversity as the foundation of its future regional growth and prosperity. Its “Dilemma workshop” is an intercultural intelligence game that puts good policy to the test by addressing difficult questions and challenging discrimination across the city administration.

Speakers

Betsy Cohen, Project Director, The St. Louis Mosaic Project

Betsy Cohen is the new Project Director for the new regional Immigration & Innovation Initiative called The St. Louis Mosaic Project. This initiative is a joint collaboration of the St. Louis County Economic Council, the St. Louis City Economic Development Corporation, the Regional Chamber and members of the other 20+ organizations on the Steering Committee. The goal is that by 2020 our region will have the fastest growth rate of foreign-born people, reversing our current declines on our regional population of 2.8 million. With this new talent at all skill levels will come entrepreneurship, job creation and people to add to our neighborhood schools, businesses, government, culture and shared economic prosperity. Betsy is on the board of the St. Louis United Way, the Advisory Board of the St. Louis University Cook School of Business, the St. Louis Crisis Nursery Advisory Board and the Washington University Council for Sustainability.

Anna E. Crosslin, President and CEO, International Institute of St. Louis

Anna Crosslin has led the International Institute of St. Louis since 1978. Founded in 1919, the Institute provides English classes, job placement, counseling, micro-lending, refugee resettlement, and other integrative services to more than 7,000 immigrants from 75 countries annually. Crosslin serves on a variety of local and national initiatives including the Steering Committee of the St. Louis Mosaic Project, which seeks to attract more immigrants to St. Louis – and retain the ones already living here. She is also a Board member of the National Asian Pacific Center for Aging, headquartered in Seattle, WA.

Helena Rojas, Director, Division for Democracy, Human Rights & Intercultural Development, Botkyrka Municipality

Currently Director of Democracy, Human Rights and Intercultural Development from the city of Botkyrka (Stockholm region, Sweden), the most ethnic diverse municipality in Sweden. She is responsible of creating the necessary conditions for a sustainable intercultural development free from discrimination. Her responsibility extends the municipal organisation and territory, as well as to contribute and promote the same development at the regional and national level. Elected Vice President of the Unesco initiative European Coalition of Cities Against Racism (ECCAR) in November 2009 for a mandate of two years, and reelected on November 2011 for a second mandate of two years.

Technical Requirements

No cost to participate. You will need a computer with internet access and speakers or a landline telephone. Pre-test System Requirements here (Adobe Connect requires the Flash Player plugin, version 11.2 or above to run).

Unable to attend?

• Email us your questions for the Q&A with presenters in advance!
• Tweet your questions during the event @CitiesMigration
• Watch it later! Register now and receive an email notification when archived presentations are online

– See more at: http://citiesofmigration.ca/webinar/regional-growth/#sthash.ZEiyKO99.dpuf