Community building and linguistic services
Comunity building includes a variety of initiatives, services and one-off programs designed to help our local organizations, neighborhoods, towns and villages develop and grow.
One of the key starting points for strengthening a community is assessing its economic health. We offer diagnostic services for communities and their organizations to identify key factors that need to be improved. We also help communities with strategic and other planning, mobilizing partners, establishing economic projects and assisting with project planning. We provide tools and resources, and assess funding opportunities for individual projects.
Through our tourism services, we work with communities to identify potential Francophone experiences, products and services, assess their level of Francophone capacity, and then market them. Through our Route Champlain or other province-wide tours we're working on, these experiences, products or services are listed and marketed across the country and even internationally to attract Francophone markets and support our local tourism economy.
Do you represent a business, organization or community that would like to add its French-language experience, product or service to our promotional efforts?
It has always been said that young people are the adults of tomorrow. Despite the obviousness of this statement, it nevertheless expresses a reality. It is therefore imperative that today's adults inspire, motivate and prepare today's youth to continue building the communities their parents and forefathers began. How does SÉO contribute? The JeunInno program.
JeunInno was launched in 2020. The main objective of this program, which is funded by the Ontario Trillium Foundation, is to counter the exodus of young people from Francophone communities, to develop their sense of belonging to their regions, towns and villages of origin, so that they can contribute to their prosperity. The program is delivered in collaboration with selected school boards, and features activities designed to stimulate leadership, creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. Since its inception, SÉO has attracted over a thousand registrations from young people aged 15 to 18.
Activities on the themes of Videography for careers, Arts and business, and Leadership in tourism have been particularly popular with young people. A club, called Club JeunInno en affaires, was also set up to encourage exchanges, share ideas and propose solutions to various issues.
As a Francophone, making yourself understood in French or obtaining services in your own language can be a challenge, depending on where you are located in Ontario. To address this challenge, in 2011, the SÉO launched Vice Versa, a social enterprise that provides translation and community interpretation services.
The services offered by Vice Versa are complementary to the overall offering of the SÉO, whose mandate is to support businesses or future businesses, assist newcomers in their quest for employment and economically strengthen communities in Ontario's Francophone and bilingual space.
Over the past few years, the social enterprise has put a great deal of effort into training community interpreters. This decision is all the more important as there is a crying shortage of community interpreters, which complicates the integration of French-speaking newcomers to Ontario. The SÉO and Vice Versa actively encourages the training of professionals in this field. That's why, in collaboration with MCIS Language Solutions, Vice Versa has also created a community interpreting training program within the new provincial Francophone business incubator.
Visit the Vice Versa website for more details (in French only).
