**6. Conclusion**

*Global Social Work - Cutting Edge Issues and Critical Reflections*

that they can work with Children Services workers for a longer period.

*5.1.3 Capacity building for cultural brokers and front-line service providers*

brokers believe that such training will also benefit other service providers.

The brokers in the current study identified the following areas of training for enhancing their capacity and improving outcomes for immigrant families experiencing violence. These include training in family conflict mediation and training to work with immigrant male perpetrators who are manipulative. Since the brokers would like to work more collaboratively with Children's Services workers and service providers from other organizations, they identified the need for training in collaborative practice—a new way of working that allows service providers to share and exchange information, focus on their individual areas of expertise with families, and introduces new members of the team in ways that are welcoming [63]. The

The findings related to mental health difficulties in new immigrant families underscore the critical need for mental health outreach services to provide training to health care workers on creating culturally safe spaces, identifying and responding to the needs of immigrant women, and being alert to the signs and risks of family violence that are often missed due to lack of cultural understanding of DV and work overload [64]. Since DV and child abuse often co-occur in families [10, 11], health care workers in partnership with cultural brokers working with immigrant parents experiencing mental health difficulties can develop specific parenting-related supports for these parents, which may help to prevent issues that lead to Children's Services involvement. Further, Children's Services in partnership with cultural brokers and community groups can help to initiate DV preventative programs like support groups for newcomer immigrant men to help them deal with issues like changing power dynamics in

The next step toward developing a good partnership will involve Children's Services organizing training workshops to prepare their staff to work with the brokers. These workshops must be offered periodically due to the high turnover of staff in Children's Services. During these workshops, policy and management support for the partnership will have to be made explicit. The role of the brokers will have to be clarified including what they will not undertake unless they have adequate support from Children's Services workers. The training workshops must also include how to work collaboratively, share power and develop relationships of mutual trust and respect. This will encourage Children's Services workers to consult with brokers before file closure, keep files open for a longer time so that the brokers can be more effective with families, and assign families to brokers early on rather than after decision to close, so

Since the brokers face risks to their safety while working in their communities, Children's Services can provide access to safety training protocols that they offer to their own staff. There are other areas where Children's Services can offer support to the brokers. They can support the brokers to get additional funding so that they can recruit more staff to share the heavy caseload that many of them currently have. A mechanism must be developed whereby the work done by brokers with the families they follow-up is recorded in the family case files held by Children's Services. In view of increasing evidence that reduction in DV will also lead to a reduction in the number of referrals to child welfare [10, 11, 14], Children' s Services can help the brokers to initiate preventative programs like mobilizing leadership from within immigrant communities to bring about changes in the patriarchal mindsets of community members. Such preventative programs can also help to alleviate the brokers' fears of being seen by community members as working against the interests of their

*5.1.2 Implementing the partnership*

**28**

community.

This study has shed light on how to optimize partnership arrangements between cultural brokers and mainstream organizations like Children's Services from the perspectives of cultural brokers. The study has limitations because of the small sample size of twelve brokers, with only five brokers who participated in all the three focus groups. This sample size however is reasonable for a qualitative inquiry [43]. Despite the small sample size, the findings are significant because they add to the small and growing body of evidence-based knowledge on community-based approaches like the use of cultural brokers as partners to improve outcomes for immigrant families resettling in countries like Canada. It is recommended that future studies on such partnerships include a larger sample of cultural brokers and involve as participants service providers from Children's Services and immigrant families who receive services from cultural brokers. This will provide a more nuanced picture of partnership challenges from different perspectives and how these can be addressed to improve outcomes for immigrant families experiencing violence.

### **Author details**

Janki Shankar1,2\* and Zetilda Ellis1

1 Faculty of Social Work, University of Calgary (Central and North), Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

2 Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

\*Address all correspondence to: jshankar@ucalgary.ca

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
