Organization that helps African newcomers in Sudbury becomes a non-profit

For the last four years,Dokun Nochirionye has been helping newcomers from Africa to settle in Sudbury.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, she started the group Thriving African Families to provide culturally relevant services and support for the growing number of newcomers from the African continent to the northern Ontario city.

The organization has just received non-profit status, which will allow Nochirionye to apply for more funding opportunities only available to registered and incorporated organizations.

"A lot of families actually experience divorce or they break up, or the kids become disconnected from their parents through the process of integrating into the new culture, just because of the stress of the process and the social isolation," Nochirionye said.

"So our organization wants to be able to serve families more, to be able to bridge that gap."

Thriving African Families started online and now offers programs that connect children with African culture, along with various support groups for parents, seniors, women and men.

"Some of these programs actually exist in Sudbury, but they're not culturally relevant," Nochirionye said.

"Most of the time African newcomers are served by people who do not understand their culture, their context, their background, and even their education and all the things that they represent."

When she started the organization,Nochirionye said,it was serving 17 families through online meetings. Now, nearly 200 families participate in Thriving African Families' eight programs.

The next step for the organization, she said, is to get its own physical space to offer all of its programming under one roof.