Our Work

Vision: A research and educational space where workers support workers across industries, identities, and immigration status.

We focus on five areas of community work:

We aim to increase awareness of precarious work and issues related to workers' challenges and opportunities for full employment, education, and training.
We aim to support collaborative and cooperative development of awareness initiatives that are relevant and responsive to community needs.
We aim to develop educational materials and resources relevant for precarious workers, service providers, and community members.
We aim to advocate for shared and consistent education and training for service providers and community members.
We aim to support efforts to address the needs of precarious workers and their families.
We aim to advocate for increased support to under-employed or unemployed or precarious workers.
We aim to encourage the development of support mechanisms that promote the safety of workers and facilitate workers' active involvement in the employment and community building processes.
We aim to enhance government and community responses to precarious work and discriminatory situations.
We aim to contribute to a sustained and comprehensive dialogue regarding response models that address the challenges associated with diverse communities.
We aim to improve responses to workers experiencing abuse or discriminatory treatment.
We aim to enable Albertans to contribute to solutions through education, training, dialogue, problem solving, and community action.
We aim to support organizing to reduce gaps and avoid duplication of services by encouraging coordination and collaboration within the broader community, amongst service delivery providers, and government departments.
We aim to provide counsel to policy makers, service providers, educators, media, and community advocates.
We aim to support consistent and standardized data collection and the communication of emerging trends, issues, and concerns within agencies and their constituencies.

Focus on precarious workers

Precarious workers face discrimination at work and their jobs are often non-unionized. Discrimination can be based on, for example, gender, skin color, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, mental or physical abilities, immigration status, age.

We are often in competition with each other and isolated, where one group of workers is blamed by another. We aim to work to build solidarity across all workers: unionized and non-unionized, citizens, permanent residents, temporary foreign workers, seasonal agricultural workers and undocumented workers, workers of all backgrounds and abilities.

As our work evolves in response to community needs, we have focused primarily on precarious workers without permanent residency status. This has included:

Researching emerging community needs and translating what we discover into support for grassroots campaigns led by the community.
Offering education that supports community campaigns and emerging needs, including educating community members about their rights and raising awareness within the broader public.
Supporting community organizing and solidarity building, including coalition building and creating organizations for workers to collectively speak for themselves.

By the numbers (2023-24)

1424 people served

We are a small organization with a big reach. Dozens of volunteers have contributed thousands of hours to connect with, support, and learn from community members. The majority of the people we serve are women (55%), between 25 and 44 years old (60%), and originally from the Philippines, Mexico, or India.
41 educational events

From informational sessions to workshops to conferences, educational events are a core service we provide to the community. Topics include labour rights, mental health, root causes of migration, organizing skills, and awareness raising around specific community concerns, such as access to education and health care.
48 Global Cafes

Our twice-monthly Global Cafe events connect community members, offer educational sessions and resources, distribute subsidized bus passes (913), celebrate culture, and build solidarity. These events have been instrumental in supporting the launch of a new grassroots community organization, Familia Migrante Latino.

Our Story

AWARE started as a group of concerned Albertans who have for the past decade been working with individual workers facing challenges in settling and managing their precarious working conditions.

By far these individuals have comprised temporary foreign workers and newcomers to Alberta, and more recently an increasing number of undocumented or under-employed workers. Seeking help from traditional organizations such as trade unions, immigrant support centres, and government supports has not been an avenue because the workers were either not allowed to use those vehicles of support (because of constraints from the funders/employers) or, more often, because they did not feel safe to approach these resources.

The question of who do you go to when you have no one is the voluntary support service we have tried to provide. Our volunteer activities include sometimes providing friendship, financial support, or linking the worker to resources, advocacy, or system navigational support, and most of the time all of the services.

Our loose network of individuals has slowly coalesced to develop an organization to formalize our relationship and work. This is due to the capacity issues we are facing as individuals undertaking this work as volunteers and the realization that we are beyond our individual capacity to meet the ever increasing need.

The Alberta Workers Association for Research and Education is a response to all these individual stories influenced by the changing nature of work in Alberta and globally.

If our story is connected to yours, please contact us. We are continually building new relationships and solidarity across Alberta.

Staff and Volunteers

Whitney Haynes, Executive Director

A founding member of AWARE, Whitney brings over a decade of experience working with undocumented and migrant worker communities in Canada, Asia, and Europe. She has academic and grassroots knowledge of global migration and labour policies.