Contextualizing community wellbeing among newcomer residents in the Greater Toronto area: a qualitative study

Newcomers experience unique social, economic, and institutional challenges that shape their wellbeing, yet community wellbeing frameworks have rarely been applied to understand settlement experiences. This qualitative study explores how newcomer residents conceptualize community wellbeing in the Greater Toronto Area, Canada, while extending an existing relational framework of community wellbeing. Four focus groups (n = 22) were conducted in partnership with community organizations and a Community Advisory Board using a participatory approach. Interviews were designed around an existing multidimensional framework of community wellbeing encompassing cultural, economic, environmental, health, political, and social domains, and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Rather than describing wellbeing through discrete domains, participants consistently framed community wellbeing as a process. They first identified the conditions necessary for wellbeing, including social and cultural networks, trusted community spaces, and access to essential services; then described the structural barriers that constrained these conditions, including discrimination, financial precarity, and challenges navigating institutions; and finally articulated opportunities for change through community organizations, responsive services, and more equitable governance. This processual framing demonstrates that community wellbeing emerges through dynamic relationships among people, places, institutions, and systems rather than through isolated individual outcomes. These findings extend relational theories of community wellbeing by illustrating how multiple community domains are experienced simultaneously throughout settlement. They also highlight the value of participatory approaches for developing more equitable and context-sensitive understandings of community wellbeing that can inform newcomer policy, planning, and evaluation.