Strangers No More: How the Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers Changed the Face of Alberta for over 40 Years

The Centre hasn’t just served newcomers. It has made our whole city a better place for every resident. . . .

Today, in a moment when far too many political leaders at home and abroad are striving to stir up anti-immigrant sentiment, to demonize asylum-seekers, to scapegoat newcomers for long-standing problems, the work of Edmonton’s Newcomer Centre has never been more essential and more urgent. We don’t just need the Centre’s remarkable team to help fresh arrivals. We need the lessons the Centre has been busy teaching Edmonton for decades: lessons about how to build an inclusive, loving, diverse community where everyone is accepted and respected, both for who they have been and for who they can become.

— Senator Paula Simons

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The Newcomer Centre’s 2025 budget is over $22 million. The first Mennonite Centre for Newcomers budget, in 1981, was for $22,220, which the board balanced by including a line for “Other Income, $6,618.50,” money they hoped to raise later. At the time, Anne Falk, the prime mover behind the Centre and its first full-time employee, is so focused on the urgent needs of Southeast Asian newcomers—health care, language education, housing, employment, moral support—that she doesn’t have the time or patience to talk about money. Her passion for the work, caring for, supporting, and loving those newcomers is the contagious, driving force for all the Mennonites and non-Mennonites at the Centre who support newcomers from around the world for the next four and a half decades.

Strangers No More is the story of those decades, a tapestry of insights, experiences, and memories of the agency’s most critical moments, told by the people who lived them and woven into a lively, engaging narrative readers will find hard to put down. Three Mennonite congregations started the Centre in 1981. In 2023, when the board renames it the Newcomer Centre, they commit that the agency will continue to honour and live by the Mennonite values and passion that have sustained it from the beginning. The people and the stories in this history show that passion and those values at work.

Gary Garrison was a senior manager at the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, where he served for over 20 years. For most of that time, he was the chief editor of Alberta Hansard, the official record of the Assembly's debates. Since leaving public service in 2002, Gary has taught postsecondary English, co-ordinated the M2W2 prison visitation program, raised two grandchildren, and published non-fiction books about his prison work and raising grandkids. He has co-authored two books of Edmonton history, written poetry for patients at the U of A hospital for 13 years, and continues to be an active member of Edmonton's literary community. His most recent publication is Poets Re-Imagine Canada: A Primer for a Land Beyond Acknowledgements, an anthology by the Edmonton Stroll of Poets Society, which he edited. Gary is also a musician, a singer-songwriter, and has seven grandchildren.