Opportunities for Employment (OFE) Inc. is a faith-based not-for-profit corporation providing employment assistance services in Winnipeg, Manitoba. As a leader in research and innovation in the employment development field, OFE continues to pioneer entrepreneurial and incentive-based approaches to employment services, resulting in increased employment rates, growth and productivity in our local economy, reduced reliance on social supports and lower costs to the Manitoba government.

Visit OFE’s CPRNW project page

Mission:

At OFE, our mission is to equip individuals to achieve greater independence by pursuing and maintaining meaningful employment.

Opportunities for Employment (OFE) has a 23-year history of serving visible minority newcomer women and other job seekers, who may present with barriers to employment.   In 2018-19, 623 of OFE’s job seekers self-identified as visible minority newcomer women. Additionally, OFE has been providing employment services to newcomers for 23 years and 55% of our participants were born outside of Canada.  While newcomers can access a variety of programs and services at OFE, they have specific programming for newcomers including the Canadian Workplace Culture Program and the Refugee Employment Development Initiative.

Opportunities for Employment (OFE) Inc. will be implementing Model 1: Milestones to Employment. The program is targeting 270 visible minority newcomer women. In order to monitor and continuously improve performance, a milestones approach will be implemented to help participants reach a series of intermediate indicators (or milestones) believed to be associated with progress towards sustainable employment.

The evaluation of OFE’s pilot programming will use a quasi-experimental methodology. The pilot will be implemented in cohorts. For each cohort, if the supply of eligible participants outnumbers employer demand, OFE will randomly assign a subset of 30 eligible clients to participate in the project as the comparison group. The comparison group will not be eligible for the above program training and services. The evaluation will also use a historical sample of OFE clients with similar characteristics (visible minority newcomer women) as an additional larger comparison group.