“WES’s reputation as a global leader in the field of credential evaluation helped us secure this critical contract with the IRCC, which in turn allowed us to significantly scale up our operations and impact. This growth would ultimately help WES evolve into the social enterprise we are today: the provider of a powerful service, the revenues from which we are able to re-invest into changing lives and systems for the better.” Shamira Madhany, Managing Director, Canada, and Deputy Executive Director In 2000, WES completed 3 4 ,000 evaluations. That number had doubled by 2013, and in 2018, WES completed close to 350,000 credential evaluations across the US and Canada and nearly 85% of all ECAs for IRCC. Experimenting with Other Pathways to Impact Around WES’s 35th anniversary in 2009, Assefa and the leadership team concluded that credential evaluations were necessary but not sufficient to help people to realise their full employment and economic potential. In parallel with growing and strengthening the credential evaluation business, WES started to experiment with other ways to foster economic inclusion for immigrants, refugees, and international students, incubating several key initiatives over the next decade. Deputy Executive Director Paul Feltman led the way in conceptualising these new areas of work. IMPRINT (which incorporates the first letters of the words ‘immigrant professional integration’) started in 2011 with five core partners. It focused on policy, advocacy, and programmatic approaches for removing barriers to economic mobility for immigrants and people who had experienced forced migration. Global Talent Bridge (GTB) launched in the US in 2012 and expanded to Canada in 2015 to work with advocacy organisations and policy groups to raise awareness around the challenges that internationally educated professionals faced in integrating into the North American employment landscape. Building on these efforts and operating under the GTB umbrella, the Skilled Immigrant Integration Program (now known as the Strengthening Immigrant Inclusion Program, or SIIP) was created
in 2017. SIIP offered technical assistance, coaching, and network building to support state government agencies and other organisations in scaling promising practices for fostering immigrant and refugee workforce inclusion. The historic WES credential evaluation business remained the organisation’s primary focus throughout the 2010s. WES’s reserves reached over USD 100 million by the end of 2018, driven by the growing customer base of immigrants to Canada. The new programmatic efforts enabled broader engagement in the field and were important steps in expanding the organisation’s impact.
WES staff in the New York office, 2017
For example, in 2018, the WES Gateway programme was initiated in Canada and over time expanded to the US. Cited by UNESCO as a model of best practice, the programme facilitates the recognition of displaced individuals’ education and enables academic institutions, employers, and licensing bodies to make informed decisions with this information. The programme has been instrumental in allowing WES to serve applicants from regions affected by war or natural disasters, in which university operations have been impacted. In 2018, other critical steps involved changes in leadership at both the board and organisational levels. Many board members transitioned out, and new members with a broader range of expertise were recruited, creating a group that spanned international education, business, philanthropy, and social impact. At the same time, Assefa made the decision to begin the process of retiring from WES, recognising that the organisation was well positioned for a new leader.
5
Powered by FlippingBook