BCCA’s In Our Hands program is exploring the opportunity to create a national organization to support newcomer professionals in developing and promoting their professional practice in Canada. From our direct engagement with participants in the In Our Hands program, we learned that many newcomer professionals struggle with transferring or starting their professional practice in Canada due to language barriers, limited professional networks in a new country, lack of knowledge of how to market their practice to Canadian clients, and poor recognition of home country education, experience and qualifications. We envision addressing these problems through setting up the National Newcomer Professionals Co-operative (NNPC), whose members would be newcomer professionals across Canada who wish to develop and/or promote their professional practice as consultants, contractors, or professional service providers.
The NNPC concept is based on the producer co-operative model, in which a group of independently-operated businesses co-operate to advance their collective business interests. Producer co-operatives are often formed for the purposes of collective marketing, cost-sharing, securing better contracts with clients and service providers, and developing new market opportunities. Producer co-operatives are most common in the food and agriculture sector (examples include the BC Tree Fruits Co-operative and River Select Fisheries Co-operative) as well as among artists, artisans and entrepreneurs (such as Yukon Artists at Work and Blooming Ladies Co-operative).
NNPC’s membership would be composed of individual newcomer consultants and/or consulting companies run by newcomers that operate independent businesses in a variety of fields (as shown in the illustration below). Members would pay a membership share and annual fee to the co-operative, thus pooling their money to build out collective supports and services such as: