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.

 

Life in a Small Community

 

In 1936, Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King said, “[s]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.

 

Needs Arise and AHC Answers the Call

 

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.

 

A Tough Beginning – and Making the Best of Things

 

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.

 

Growing Onward

 

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.

 

What Comes Next?

 

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.