Intercultural Connections and Anti-Racism Engagement (ICARE) is a project to build relationships between Indigenous, newcomer, established immigrant, and settler organizations and community members while addressing racism, oppression, and colonialism through an intersectional decolonial lens. Some aspects of the project will take place in specific communities, others will have a provincial reach.
ICARE is explicitly designed to work toward the elimination of discrimination, racism, and prejudice through workshops for a variety of audiences, online resources and conversations including regional intercultural and anti-racism community activities, regional organizational networking, and deepening the understanding of racism and colonialism in the multicultural community.
ICARE is all about working together to build awareness and change attitudes. It is founded on the belief that the combination of intercultural relationships and anti-racism education allows people to sit with discomfort and learn. The components of ICARE take this a step further by including opportunities for plans for action to make communities better places for all.
New Year, New Direction
ICARE was offered through community events in Regina, Prince Albert, and La Ronge from February 2023 to March 2025. Successes included the opportunities to work intensively in all three communities building relationships, partnerships, and understanding both the unique and common dynamics and needs throughout all three.
Some of that programming targeted young people. This let us see that many youth are lacking in opportunities and we knew it was something we were interested in engaging with further. We worked to address this by creating the ICARE Youth Program Pilot, which makes space for both youth and adults to work side-by-side in their anti-racism and community building journeys.
Previously, we encountered challenges in building from one activity to the next because it was difficult to ensure repeat or ongoing participation. We explored the reasons with staff and partners through organizational networking meetings and with participants through written and verbal evaluation. It became apparent that the kind of impact and change ICARE is designed to lead to requires planning to build relationships, skills, knowledge, and experience.
Youth Pilot Project
With all of that in mind, we were able to pilot our ICARE Youth Program in partnership with Regina Public Schools during the 2025-26 school year. Registration and commitment to the pilot and series of modules allowed us to achieve the intended outcomes, and enabled more effective measurement, evaluation and storytelling. Each student received a certificate of completion at the end of each module for Intercultural Connections, Anti-Racism Knowledge, Leadership Development, and Community Impact.
What is ICARE?
“I would say that [ICARE] is about building relationships and supporting those relationships.”
“It’s about getting newcomers, established settlers, established immigrants, Indigenous organizations working toward the same goals — and the goals would be equity, reconciliation, anti-racism obviously. But how do we support those communities? Because each community is unique, right? So I feel like a lot of our job is fostering the conversations that help communities push forward.”
Why do we need ICARE in Saskatchewan?
“In Saskatchewan we have harsh anti-Indigenous racism issues. We still have a sort of Manifest Destiny ideas in our heads in Saskatchewan and I think that it’s really important not to end colonialism — because we’ve been introduced to colonialism because there’s always going to be aspects of colonialism that we use — but I think that it’s important to honour the fact that we have people Indigenous to Saskatchewan that do not learn and operate historically, ancestrally in the same ways that a lot of settler organizations do.”
“There’s a lot of newly immigrated people, people who are here on refugee status … they also don’t function in the same colonial system that our settlers here do. So I think it is important to dissect those things and change them, and that’s our job is to hopefully open people’s eyes to opportunities, to find those loopholes, to decolonize.
What do you envision for the future of ICARE?
“I really want to continue breaking down barriers, helping people accessing education they may need, helping people find safe spaces they may need, that sort of thing. I would really like to bring more of the general community into … it would be similar to what we were doing with advisory communities, like ‘what does the community want from us, how can we best serve the community?’”
Learn more about what the ICARE program accomplished throughout the 2025-26 year in our Annual Report HERE (starting on page 17).
Check back for upcoming events, programs, and workshops!
Thank you to the Department of Canadian Heritage for funding this project!
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Regina, SK. S4R 3C1
MCoS’ work and support reaches lands covered by Treaties 2, 4, 5, 6, 8 & 10 traditional lands of the Nehiyaw/Nehithaw/Nehinaw/Cree, Nahkawe/Saulteaux, Dakota, Lakota, Nakota, and Dene peoples and Homeland of the Métis/Michif.
