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On June 25th, 2025, Action for Healthy Communities celebrated its 30th anniversary. This milestone event was a heartfelt tribute to all the contributors, communities, clients, volunteers, and dedicated staff members who have passionately supported our mission to foster healthier communities across Alberta over the past three decades.
Despite the looming weather, over 400 enthusiastic attendees gathered together to commemorate not just the organization’s achievements but also the remarkable individuals and diverse communities that have been integral to our story for the last 30 years. The atmosphere was vibrant, filled with laughter, joy, and a sense of unity as we reflected on the incredible strides we have made together.
Our anniversary was more than just a celebration; it was a festive gathering that brought together communities, families, and individuals of all ages. Attendees were treated to a free BBQ, a photo booth, and family-friendly activities. Our vendors from the Entrepreneurship Support Program (ESP) and our partners also showcased their services and offerings.
More than 30 dedicated volunteers came together to support our anniversary—and their presence made all the difference. From setting up early in the day to assisting guests, managing logistics, and even helping shelter others during unexpected rain, their efforts brought warmth, energy, and care to every corner of the celebration.
One of the highlights of our 30th anniversary was the incredible showcase of community talent through eight unique cultural performances. This year, we extended a special thank you to the groups who joined us in celebrating, sharing not only their artistry but also the rich tapestries of their cultures. Each performance was a reminder of the vibrant diversity that enriches our community.
We were also honoured to have the Legislative Assembly of Alberta MLA of Edmonton-City Centre David Shepherd and the City of Edmonton Counsellor Jennifer Rice representing the office of Mayor Amarjeet Sohi to present us with celebratory scrolls.
After our 30th Anniversary Celebration programming concluded, we conducted our annual general meeting (AGM) for all board members. As members gathered, we at AHC reviewed our fiscal year and voted on our future strategic direction. Our AGM also introduced new board chair directors David Bourne, Faisal Shafiq, and John Alexander.
Additionally, our last annual report was also unveiled for the first time and can be found on our AHC website at Publications & Resources – Action for Healthy Communities.
From seedling to a now prospering tree, our 30th anniversary leaves much for us to reflect on and where we are headed. We want to extend our most heartfelt gratitude to all our guests, contributors, clients, community members, volunteers, and participants who made our 30th anniversary celebration a memorable event. Each of you played a crucial role in our journey, and your continued support inspires us to forge ahead with our mission.
Thank you for being part of our story and for standing with us as we strive to create healthier, more inclusive communities. Here’s to the next chapter of Action for Healthy Communities! We can’t wait to see what we will accomplish together in the years to come.
On June 25, 2025, we celebrated our 30th Anniversary by honouring our collaborators, partners, and supporters with the Partnership Award and the Excellence in Service Award. For 30 years, AHC has been fortunate to have dedicated and passionate individuals and organizations supporting us in our mission, helping us ensure that equity-deserving individuals and newcomers have the services and programs they need to thrive.
To honour our remarkable collaborators, we introduced these awards to acknowledge individuals and organizations that have gone above and beyond to serve our clients and communities. Their dedication has shaped AHC into the organization it is today, helping equity-deserving individuals and newcomers access the crucial services and programs they need to thrive.
These recipients truly exemplified the spirit of community service and commitment.
Partnership Award recipients include the following organizations and individuals:
Excellence in Service Award recipients include the following individuals:
Each of these awardees has demonstrated exceptional commitment to serving our community and uplifting those around them. Their contributions have not gone unnoticed, and we are deeply thankful for their unwavering partnership. Congratulations to all the winners and to everyone whose collaboration is essential to our organization.
We could not have achieved our 30-year milestone without your continued partnership. Your dedication fuels our mission, and we are excited to continue this journey together as we strive for a more equitable future.
The fourth quarterly Community of Practice session was held on November 30, 2024, with 15 community leaders in attendance. This interactive session provided an opportunity to reflect on the October 9 Building Inclusive Communities Forum. Participants shared valuable feedback about the forum's impact and engaged in in-depth discussions about the successes, challenges, and lessons learned from their community initiatives. A significant focus of the session was on identifying strategies to ensure the long-term sustainability of these projects.
The "Reflection and Experience Sharing" theme served as an excellent platform for community leaders to learn from one another, refine their approaches, and deepen their collective understanding. It highlighted the power of collaboration and shared knowledge in driving meaningful change.
Overall, the CoP has been instrumental in sustaining impactful community initiatives, ensuring they remain aligned with the broader community mission and vision. It continues to serve as a valuable resource for fostering growth, learning, and mutual support among community leaders.
In summary, we successfully completed four CoP sessions this year—three quarterly sessions and one large-scale Building Inclusive Communities event on October 9, 2024. We also saw a shift in leadership, as community leaders began taking ownership of the CoPs, including agenda-setting, topic selection, and session facilitation.
Earlier this October, AHC's Rural Small Centres' Team hosted their first Winter Badminton Tournament in Camrose.
Inclusion in sports has innumerable benefits for youth, but many newcomer youth face barriers to sports due to sports organizations and facilities not anticipating their background and accommodating to their different languages and cultures.
We are so happy to create more opportunities for newcomer youth to increase their health, their social ties, and build confidence as they try new sports.
Thank you to all that participated and congratulations to our winners, Nice, Reece, and Axle.
If you a newcomer living in Rural Alberta and would like support in accessing resources or organizations in your community, you can learn more about Rural Small Centre's or email us at communications@a4hc.ca!
Throughout August 2020, AHC's Settlement Team facilitated weekly in-person workshops to help clients learn about Alberta Works online reporting tool, teaching them how to report their monthly incomes, where to report, how to manages any changes in their information and more! In addition, the program held a workshop in the last week on August to help inform newcomer families about back-to-school during the COVID-19 pandemic, how the changes will impact their children's learning, what their options for learning are, and how to continue being able to support their children's learning during this time.
Staff and clients adhered to strict COVID-19 protocols, including social distancing and masks while in the building.
Images from these workshops are below.
Action for Healthy Communities (AHC) has a long history in Edmonton—a tradition of service and capacity-building we are reflecting on for our 30th anniversary year. The needs and hopes of communities within Edmonton have formed the basis of our mission for decades, but it doesn’t end there. Beginning in 2020, AHC officially expanded beyond Edmonton with the launch of the agency's Small Centres program.
Funded by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to serve the needs of newcomers to Canada settling outside of the country’s biggest cities, AHC became a part of the national network of settlement providers in rural and smaller communities across Canada. Since then, AHC's Small Centres program has established three offices — Leduc, Bonnyville, and Camrose — serving more than twenty-five communities throughout Central and Eastern Alberta.
The AHC Small Centres program team has only seven staff members, serving the needs of newcomers to Canada in an area larger than Switzerland. We often describe ourselves as “small but mighty,” and that reputation is well-earned. Establishing services has been a challenge, but as any of our Small Centres team members or clients will tell you, the growing pains have been worth it.
In 1936, Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King said, “ome countries have too much history. This country has too much geography.” Nearly a century later, it is easier to travel, but Canada is just as vast and geography remains the key to understanding Small Centres.
According to Statistics Canada, more than 70% of immigrants choose to settle in Vancouver or Toronto. An additional 25% settle in one of Canada’s Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs) larger cities, and the suburbs surrounding them. For roughly 5% of newcomers who start in Canada in a rural community, immigration can look quite different to the city.
Getting around is difficult; many newcomers to Canada rely on public transportation, which typically doesn’t exist in small towns. Until you get a driver’s license and a car, that means walking everywhere (to work, to school, to the store), no matter the weather. Canada is known to be cold, but even the most seasoned Canadian shudders at the thought of walking 5km in -30 to pick up groceries.
For children and youth in K-12 schools, ESL classes typically aren’t available — which means starting in Grade 8 with all the other kids, even if you’ve never studied English before. Imagine arriving in Canada and being expected to write an essay in a language you do not know how to speak!
Of course, there are advantages to life in small communities, like significantly cheaper housing costs, community safety, and employment opportunities in certain sectors. For newcomers who build their homes in small communities, many cannot imagine living anywhere else.
Before our formal Small Centres program, AHC staff would receive requests for support from communities elsewhere in Alberta. Requests for settlement support, assistance with citizenship and documentation, and support for children and youth enrolled in schools would arrive and be supported by AHC’s Edmonton staff. These occasional or “itinerant” supports began in the 2010s and occurred on an ongoing basis, particularly from the Settlement Team.
In these early days, AHC’s Edmonton team would pay several visits to Small Centres, learning more about the needs of newcomers in the community and how AHC could best support them. These early visits sought to build connections with leaders in the communities, including mayors, school administrators, and social services providers. It was an opportunity to learn about what was out there, beyond the requests that occasionally landed in AHC inboxes.
As CFP 2019 approached, AHC looked to establish a formal Small Centres program, expanding these requests into a structured program outside of the city. After receiving funding from IRCC, this program began with the Camrose and Cold Lake/Bonnyville in 2020.
Camrose, a small city of about 25,000 people, is located 100km southeast of Edmonton and is home to the University of Alberta’s Augustana campus. Bonnyville is a town of 6,000 people roughly 250km northeast of Edmonton, and Cold Lake is a city of 20,000 roughly 300km northeast of Edmonton, at the Alberta-Saskatchewan border.
Officially, the Small Centres program launched in April 2020, during the deepest period of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. While many of us would like to forget those difficult days, they are a key part of the Small Centres story.
In those first months of the program, staff couldn't gather in person, visit schools, undertake community visits, or do the type of outreach and networking that makes new connections possible. While children around the world were beginning to attend virtual school, many Small Centres clients did not have internet access or computers in their homes.
As restrictions began to lift in 2021, things improved, and the pandemic lockdowns brought some unanticipated advantages. The normalization of virtual meetings made it much easier for the team to meet, and other AHC staff, no matter where they were in the province.
Now, in 2025, it is common for the AHC Small Centres program team to have 20 hours of virtual meetings a week, ensuring connection and collaboration, even hundreds of kilometres away. A Ukrainian-speaking team member in Bonnyville supports interpretation for a team member visiting a school in Drayton Valley; a Camrose-based staff member hosts a conversation with staff of the Edmonton-based Settlement team to solve a complex problem.
In April 2021, Small Centres was approved to launch a third site in Leduc and Beaumont. Leduc is a growing city of 50,000 just south of Edmonton. Unlike most of the Small Centres, nearly everyone in Edmonton has visited Leduc, as it is home to the Edmonton International Airport. The lessons learned from the first year made it easier to connect with a growing newcomer community. Since then, we have sought to expand into even more communities throughout the province and offer occasional services to hamlets, villages, and towns throughout Central and Eastern Alberta.
Beyond Small Centres’ growth as a program, rural Alberta has had newcomer waves of its own in the last five years. Driven by post-pandemic labour shortages, small communities saw huge arrivals of temporary foreign workers in 2022 and 2023. While not considered “eligible clients,” these arrivals are a core cohort of the Small Centres’ services and outreach in Rural Alberta. There was also significant settlement of Ukrainians through the Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET) program. The CUAET arrivals often chose to settle in historic Ukrainian communities in Eastern Alberta, where Ukrainians had first landed at the turn of the 20th century. These historic patterns continue to influence immigration, even in the 2020s.
In 2025, the AHC Small Centres will be adding one additional centre in Parkland County, west of Edmonton. With the benefit of experience and the team’s reputation throughout Alberta, we believe this new addition will be able to seamlessly join our services throughout the province. Heading into this new period, our team is still small but more than ready to provide our services to newcomers looking to make rural Alberta home.
Action for Healthy Communities (AHC) Settlement and Integration program hosted its annual FREE Tax Clinic for individuals and families with low income, from March 3 to May 16, 2025. To better assist the community, the tax clinic at AHC’s main office in Edmonton will continue until May 16, operating Monday to Friday from 9:30 AM to 2:30 PM.
"Filing taxes is more than a legal requirement in Canada—it’s a key step in accessing government benefits and community services," said Settlement and Integration Program Manager Suraj Khatiwada. "Through this initiative, AHC ensures that all low-income Canadian residents have the support they need to take advantage of these important opportunities."
Our team has assisted individuals across Edmonton at AHC's main office, the c5 Hub, and Mill Woods Seniors Association. This volunteer-driven program has already supported over 2,500 clients in March and April, thanks to the dedication of more than 55 trained volunteers. Volunteers not only provide essential support by helping clients file their taxes but also gain valuable professional experience and expand their networks.
Our team of volunteers supported over 2,500 clients."I am very grateful for the guidance and support of my supervisors and the AHC staff in general, which has made this journey both meaningful and rewarding," said Fatima Nazir. "I have gained practical tax knowledge, administrative and client service experience, honed my skills, and helped others, all while preparing myself for future job opportunities, got the hands-on experience of Canadian work environment."
For clients, the clinic offers access to crucial government benefits and credits, tax refunds, and Notices of Assessment, which are often required for services such as housing, childcare, or student aid.
“I am thrilled with help I have got from Action . The volunteers help me a lot to understand the tax system while filing my taxes. I got efficient appointment booking and am happy with the help.” said client Peter Tut.
The following is a breakdown of average refund amounts per return:
This initiative continues to make a meaningful impact in the community—improving financial well-being and supporting long-term settlement and stability for low-income residents.
“I am happy that Action provided a nice service and friendly and comfortable environment to file my tax. Thank you,” said another tax clinic client.
Learn more about our 2025 Tax Clinc
On Friday, March 4, 2022, AHC rural Small Centre's, Paola Shanks together with Sherry Depner from the Lakeland Catholic Schools, supported more than 30 young newcomers from several different communities being able to try out curling!
This event was quite successful, and the largest single-day community connections event to date for the rural Small Centres. The event also strengthened the program's relationship with the school division!
Learn more about our Rural Small Centres program here.