Immigrants' "Role Shift" for Sustainable Urban Communities: A Case Study of Toronto's Multiethnic Community Farm

As the ongoing health crisis has recently revealed, disparities and social exclusions experienced by immigrants in cities are now critical urban issues that can no longer be overlooked in the process of building sustainable urban communities. However, within the current practices aiming for social inclusion of immigrants, there has been an underlying assumption that immigrants are permanent "recipients" of their host society's support, rather than potential "hosts" with abilities to support others in their society in the long-term. To question that assumption, this paper aims to identify immigrants' degree of involvement by taking a multiethnic community farm in Toronto, Canada, as a case study to discuss the scope of the long-term inclusion of immigrants. Conducting a set of 15 life story interviews with participants of the Black Creek Community Farm (BCCF), the study identified what roles immigrants played within the group using the longitudinal analysis of individuals' role-taking processes between 2010-2018. The paper identified three types of roles-recipient, assistant, and facilitator-taken by the participants during their involvement. The timeline of individual role types by year showed that more than half of the immigrants at the BCCF underwent a "role shift" to take an assistant and facilitator role that required higher engagement. The findings suggest immigrants' orientations towards the BCCF have shifted from being the ones to be included to the ones including others in the local community over time, which confirms our hypothesis.