Multicultural Health Broker

Who are we?

The Multicultural Health Brokers Cooperative is a registered Workers Cooperative with a mandate to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate support to immigrant and refugee families from around the world. We are grassroots, hands-on organization that believes in fostering genuine, empowering, and often long-term relationships with our clients, communities, and each other to increase the health of individuals, families, and communities.

We are seeking Multicultural Health Broker for work among the South Asian community in Edmonton. Strong 1 language skills in Bengali, Malayalam, Tamil, and Hindi are desired, Urdu & Punjabi would be considered an asset.

The role of the Broker is to work collaboratively with Child Intervention to build parenting capacity, health, and well-being with families in South Asian communities. These families and children often come to us in crisis, facing complex life circumstances without key supports. The support that a Broker provides includes holistic family support, building one-on-one relationship with clients, walking side by side with them as they navigate through individual challenges - whether it's health, housing, economic, or relationship challenges as well as bringing people together in groups for mutual support and participatory education.  There are also elements of advocacy for clients and community in general.

Who are you?

Working as a Cultural Broker is both challenging and rewarding work. It requires a warm heart, a clear mind, and a deep willingness to learn not just new skills, but about yourself and others. To be able to flourish in the work, you will need to be able to tolerate uncertainty, ambiguity, and what might feel like chaos at times. These are some of the qualities you need to have:

• You can take joy simply in establishing a trusting supportive relationship with another and in small improvements.
• You are humble and sincerely interested in learning from those around you including the families we serve.
• You are interested in personal growth and can openly acknowledge and learn from mistakes as well as successes.
• You are comfortable with ambiguity and can rest in "not-knowing" who is right and who is wrong.
• You are capable of empathy for everyone in a situation, even where there is conflict.
• You seek to understand different perspectives to move towards well-being of the entire family/community.
• You can work with complex situations that have no easy quick answers without getting overwhelmed.
• You can think creatively and find solutions that are sometimes out of the box.
• You value the spirit of a guideline rather than applying guidelines rigidly.
• You know that caring for yourself is important and you are committed to building your health on many levels - physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

We are hoping you have the following experiences and abilities:

• Lived experience in South Asia, perhaps with family/friend connections that are still visited, which could facilitate deeper cultural interpretation, which is often as or more important than language interpretation.
• Experience in working with Child Welfare and/or other community support systems would be an asset.
• Understanding of the traditional beliefs, faiths, values, and practices, including community values, family relationships and parenting practices of the diverse South Asian communities – and of both how to honour these and understand how they have been impacted the Canadian context.
• Being familiar with various pre-migration experiences of immigrant families out of South Asia.
• Being able to assess and understand your own cultural identity and value-base.
• Being familiar with dominant culture and being able to navigate formal systems in Canada.

Ideally you would have the following knowledge or qualifications:

• Intimate knowledge of the South Asian communities in Edmonton.
• Knowledge of local health and social services, including our child welfare system.
• Some training in or knowledge of holistic family support and casework.
• Knowledgeable of family violence and its interplay with community dynamics.
• Familiarity with the issues facing immigrant and refugee children, youths, and families.
• The ability to speak and write fluent English.
• A vehicle and a valid driver's license are a definite asset.

What will you do?

Brokering work is varied and you will be working in many different environments and contexts. You can expect to be surprised and challenged daily. Here are some aspects to the work:

• Responding quickly to referrals for cultural brokering and holistic family support. This will involve doing home visits to the family communicating directly and in person with all family members, especially parents. To help facilitate this, a valid driver license and your own vehicle are considered an asset.
• Providing bicultural parenting education and assistance.
• Connecting the families to needed resources and services within Edmonton; these will cover the full range, from services that meet the basic needs to those that enrich the functioning of the family.
• Organizing and facilitating groups for parents wanting peer support and the chance to learn from each other.
• Working with counseling colleagues to provide emotional and mental health support to families.
• Providing advocacy and individualized assistance to those families in contact with a Children and Family Services social worker.
• Entering information into our client data system in a timely manner.
• Participating in the life of the Cooperative by attending meetings and professional development

What will we do for you?

A few of the most common things that people who work for MCHB say is that they feel accepted for who they are, that they feel trusted and able to find their own way to work creatively and that they love the sense of personal growth in the work. We actively foster a work environment that is caring, egalitarian in tone, and respectful of your creative energy. We also believe in on-going professional learning and gathering together in ways that foster support and learning from each other. This position has a starting wage of $25/hour depending on your experience.

What are the next steps?

Please send us a resume and cover letter that tells us about you and how your experience fits in with what we are looking for in a Broker. In your cover letter:

• Please include your experience working with South Asian communities in Edmonton or Canada.
• Please include something from your life experience that has called you to this type of work.
• Please include the reason you have chosen Multicultural Health Brokers as a place you would like to work.

Submit your resume or direct any questions to Monique Nutter at or

Posting will remain open until a suitable candidate is found.

Job Type: Permanent

Pay: From $25.00 per hour

Benefits:

• Dental care
• Flexible schedule
• On-site parking
• Vision care

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Edmonton, AB T5H 0T7