Learn more about the work of CMS Community Advisory Board member, Koyali Burman.
Koyali Burman is Director of the Vancouver Local Immigration Partnership (VLIP), with over 15 years of experience in stakeholder engagement, strategy development, and monitoring and evaluation. Holding a Master’s degree from UBC and a United Nations Diplomacy Fellowship, she also brings a global lens to her work on migration, governance, and gender and economic development — including evaluation work across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia and a publication on women’s economic empowerment for the BC Centre for International Cooperation. She has served as Vice President of AMSSA, Co-President of the UN Association – Vancouver Branch, and a member of the Centre for Migration Studies community advisory board, and has spoken at conferences and universities across Canada, the United States, and India. Her leadership is grounded in curiosity, evidence-informed practice and a deep belief that lasting change is built through trust.
Can you tell us about your professional journey and what brought you to work in the newcomer settlement sector in Canada?
My path was shaped by curiosity. As an international student at UBC doing a Master’s program studying program planning and evaluation, I became interested in how people build belonging in new communities and how systems can better support that process. These reflections, alongside my work with UBC’s global citizenship initiative, founded and continue to guide my leadership approach. Over nearly a decade in community development and immigration settlement, I have managed multi-funded portfolios and built cross-sector partnerships, learning to balance immediate community needs with the systemic conditions that shape them. Parallel evaluation work across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia provided a global perspective on equity-driven change. The Director role at the Vancouver Local Immigration Partnership (VLIP) felt like the convergence of these experiences. Growing the network to more than 90 partner representatives has reinforced my belief that meaningful change is fundamentally relational.
What systemic barriers continue to limit newcomers’ full participation in Canada’s economy, and how can organizations in the settlement sector address them collaboratively?
Many of the barriers that limit newcomers’ full participation in Canada’s economy are well known: challenges with credential recognition, unequal access to professional networks, digital access, and persistent gender inequities in the labour market. The challenge is not identifying these barriers—it is building coordinated and sustainable responses to address them. No single organization can address these challenges alone. The settlement sector is at its strongest when it functions as an interconnected system. When settlement agencies, employers, educational institutions, and governments work from shared evidence, align priorities, and coordinate their efforts, responses become more effective and sustainable. Launching the VLIP Gender Network showed me how profoundly gendered these barriers are. Moving forward, when agencies, employers, and government align around common data, the response to barriers becomes coherent. That infrastructure of collaboration is what the sector needs to keep investing in.
Your work spans Canadian settlement and international development. How does that international experience shape your approach, and where do you see opportunities for greater integration between these two worlds?
Working across 15 countries in international development gave me a systems perspective that continues to shape my approach to settlement work in Canada. Through evaluating open schooling systems, supporting gender-sensitive ICT strategies, and designing mentoring frameworks for women in rural South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, I developed a more critical understanding of the assumptions embedded in the idea of “integration” itself. As a UN Diplomacy Fellow, I also examined the global displacement system and Canada’s role within it, reinforcing that migration and settlement are part of the same continuum. There are also significant opportunities for stronger knowledge exchange between international development and settlement, particularly in areas such as gender transformative programming and women’s economic empowerment. My 2022 publication with the BC Centre for International Cooperation was one effort to help bridge that gap.
As the immigration landscape continues to change, what forms of collaboration are most important for effectively supporting newcomers?
One of the most meaningful shifts at VLIP has been strengthening collaboration between Anglophone and Francophone settlement organizations. While both support newcomer integration, Francophone newcomers in British Columbia have often relied on a separate network, with limited cross-system collaboration. We have been working to bridge this divide by creating shared spaces where both partners can align priorities, share data, and co-design responses that better support Francophone newcomers. This has reinforced my belief that effective collaboration requires recognizing who has historically been excluded and intentionally reinforcing inclusivity in those spaces. I have also been focused on building adaptive governance. I recently presented VLIP’s hybrid governance model at a conference at UBC, where it was subsequently published. As policies and community needs evolve, adaptive governance helps partners remain aligned and respond collectively to change.
As a member of CMS’ advisory board, where do you see the greatest opportunities for research organizations like CMS to collaborate with the settlement sector?
The biggest opportunity is to build in knowledge sharing so that findings travel across the sector rather than sit in unread reports. A second important opportunity lies in policy translation. Organizations like CMS generate evidence that is directly relevant to IRCC and provincial partners. There is significant value in building those relationships and channels of influence before policy windows open, so that evidence can actively shape policy design rather than being used only to respond once decisions have already been made.
What is an issue overlooked in Canadian immigration that researchers could support?
While we have substantial data on labour market integration and service utilization, we know far less about what supports long-term well-being. There is still limited understanding of how pre-migration trauma intersects with post-migration stressors such as housing insecurity, precarious employment, and social isolation. Another critical gap is the experience of migrant workers. Despite their essential contributions to key sectors of the economy, their lived realities and long-term outcomes are not adequately captured in existing research or policy frameworks. Finally, the outcomes of second-generation immigrants—the children of newcomers—deserve far more sustained attention. Their experiences of identity, belonging, upward mobility, and systemic barriers offer important insights into how integration unfolds over time, yet this population is often treated as peripheral in immigration research. Understanding their trajectories is essential for a fuller picture of what successful inclusion looks like across generations.
What advice would you give researchers who want to make their work more accessible and actionable for settlement practitioners?
The most useful knowledge in this sector begins with the practitioner’s question, not the research question. A frontline coordinator is often focused on something very immediate: does this work, for this community, in this context? When we start there, theory can emerge more organically, grounded in the realities of practice and shaped by what is needed on the ground. It also matters how knowledge is shared. A journal article has its place, but it does not always reach the program coordinator managing multiple funded programs while meeting a reporting deadline. Meeting people where they are means producing and sharing knowledge in different formats, so insights are accessible, timely, and usable across roles in the sector.
