The Centre hasnโt just served newcomers. It has made our whole city a better place for every resident. . . .
Today, in a moment when far too many political leaders at home and abroad are striving to stir up anti-immigrant sentiment, to demonize asylum-seekers, to scapegoat newcomers for long-standing problems, the work of Edmontonโs Newcomer Centre has never been more essential and more urgent. We donโt just need the Centreโs remarkable team to help fresh arrivals. We need the lessons the Centre has been busy teaching Edmonton for decades: lessons about how to build an inclusive, loving, diverse community where everyone is accepted and respected, both for who they have been and for who they can become.
โ Senator Paula Simons
The Newcomer Centreโs 2025 budget is over $22 million. The first Mennonite Centre for Newcomers budget, in 1981, was for $22,220, which the board balanced by including a line for โOther Income, $6,618.50,โ money they hoped to raise later. At the time, Anne Falk, the prime mover behind the Centre and its first full-time employee, is so focused on the urgent needs of Southeast Asian newcomersโhealth care, language education, housing, employment, moral supportโthat she doesnโt have the time or patience to talk about money. Her passion for the work, caring for, supporting, and loving those newcomers is the contagious, driving force for all the Mennonites and non-Mennonites at the Centre who support newcomers from around the world for the next four and a half decades.
Strangers No More is the story of those decades, a tapestry of insights, experiences, and memories of the agencyโs most critical moments, told by the people who lived them and woven into a lively, engaging narrative readers will find hard to put down. Three Mennonite congregations started the Centre in 1981. In 2023, when the board renames it the Newcomer Centre, they commit that the agency will continue to honour and live by the Mennonite values and passion that have sustained it from the beginning. The people and the stories in this history show that passion and those values at work.
