7 Making Multicultural Community at the Institute

Chapter Seven Making Multicultural Community at the InstituteIn 1961, Director Nell West boasted that the members who participated in the house programs of the International Institute of Metropolitan Toronto represented sixty different ethnic nationalities. 1 Most of those members were from Europe, though the subsequent arrival of immigrants from the Caribbean, East and South Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere did further diversify, albeit modestly, a multicultural community space whose non-white members initially consisted mainly of a small number of Chinese Canadians and Japanese Canadians.The staff of the Institute's Department of Group Services worked with the membership to run a daily roster of social, recreational, and educational programs intended to encourage identification with the Institute and its pluralist goals, promote intercultural dialogue, and foster a sense of collective belonging.The sponsored clubs and recreational activities were meant to encourage collaborative and democratic modes of organizing as well as to facilitate crosscultural friendships and forge self-regulated citizens.In this respect, the Toronto Institute was, to quote Bettina Bradbury and Tamara Myers, an "intermediate" space located at what Leonore Davidoff famously called "the ragged frontiers between the public and private." It was a site where everyday interactions occurred among a culturally diverse collection of social workers, newcomers, and Torontonians.A focus on the members' activities and their interactions with the staff permits an examination of the processes of group-identity formation and collective belonging, as well as matters involving personal agency and resistance to the regulatory features of social work practice.2 The membership differed with respect to class, education, age, marital status, and gender, though the majority of members, like most staffers, fit an urban middle-class profile.Eastern European men of professional origins were among the Institute's most active members and its loudest critics.Insofar as member/ staff interactions involved differently located actors negotiating hierarchal relations shaped by the agency's rules and broader social welfare policies, the

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.