Leisure as Pathway for Cultural Connection: A Case Study of Newcomer Iranian Women (30–55 Years Old) and a Settlement Service Organization in Ottawa, Canada

Abstract

Community-based leisure may support newcomer women’s well-being and belonging, yet its role within settlement practice remains underexamined. This manuscript presents findings from a larger community-based research project that explored Iranian newcomer women’s (aged 30–55) experiences navigating leisure, community life, and well-being during their settlement in Ottawa, Canada. In this manuscript, the discussion focuses on data collected from virtual feedback consultation sessions with two women who participated in co-designed leisure activities, and an executive from a non-profit settlement service organization serving Iranian and Farsi-speaking newcomers. Data coding, translation, verification and reflexive thematic analysis guided our qualitative methodological approach, and findings were interpreted within an intersectional feminist framework. Our findings revealed the challenges the participating women faced in balancing employment, caregiving, and household labour while acclimatizing to Canada. The women in this study described leisure as a vital interruption of their layered responsibilities and a chance to connect with others who shared their migration experience. Leisure did not replace formal settlement supports but addressed dimensions of settlement that 33 conventional indicators often miss, including identity loss, unfamiliarity with the city, and 34 the need for connection in a shared language and cultural setting. In this case, the settlement organization functioned as a cultural infrastructure that made participation in public and cultural life accessible for the women who took part.

1. Introduction

Newcomer settlement is often discussed through immediate practical priorities, such as employment, housing, language acquisition, access to health care, and navigation of government services [1,2]. These dimensions matter, but they do not fully capture how people build a livable everyday life after migration. Once initial needs are addressed, social connection, emotional belonging, place familiarity, and access to community participation remain important to settlement [3,4]. For immigrant women managing paid work, caregiving, household responsibilities, and weakened extended-family networks, belonging is closely tied to whether they can enter public and cultural life without barriers of language, cost, unfamiliarity, transportation, or social judgement [5,6]. Community-based leisure is one practical pathway through which such connection can begin, particularly when activities are accessible, culturally respectful, and relationally supported [7,8,9].

This manuscript focuses on Iranian newcomer women aged 30 to 55 in Ottawa, Canada. Research on leisure as a pathway to belonging among Iranian immigrant women in Canada remains limited, and the role of settlement organizations in facilitating leisure participation has received even less sustained attention [5,6,10,11]. This gap matters because settlement organizations are often understood primarily through their formal service functions, such as referrals, employment support, language support, or housing navigation. Yet in practice, they may also act as cultural and community infrastructure, helping newcomers move from private survival into public, social, and civic participation.

Ottawa provides a specific context for this inquiry. In the 2021 Census, 259,215 immigrants lived in Ottawa, representing 25.9% of the city’s population, including 47,415 recent immigrants who arrived between 2016 and 2021 [12]. Within Ottawa, the Iranian-origin population is relatively small compared with larger Iranian communities in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. Statistics Canada data show approximately 6055 people of Iranian origin in Ottawa and approximately 200,460 nationally [13]. This smaller and more dispersed community context may affect the availability of women-centred, culturally familiar, and Farsi-language leisure networks.

Settlement for Iranian newcomer women also carries a transnational dimension. Participants’ lives in Canada unfolded alongside concern for family members in Iran during a period of political upheaval, including the mobilization associated with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement [14,15]. Iranian immigrants in North America may also navigate what Sadeghi describes as geopolitical stigma, a racialized positioning shaped by strained relations between Iran and Western governments [16]. These conditions form part of the emotional field in which settlement takes place. They also clarify why culturally familiar leisure and trusted community settings may matter not only as recreation but as forms of recognition, relief, and belonging.

We approach this inquiry as a single case study. Iranian newcomer women aged 30 to 55 in Ottawa are a small and dispersed population, and those who take part in a connected series of community activities are fewer still, which makes sustained participation difficult to observe at scale. A case study is suited to precisely these conditions, where the value of the work lies in the depth of what a small number of situated accounts can reveal rather than in the breadth of a sample [17]. Following the women through the full sequence of activities allows us to trace how access developed over time. This is a deliberate methodological choice rather than a shortfall. Qualitative case study research is judged by the depth and credibility of its account, not by the size or representativeness of a sample, and its purpose is analytic rather than statistical generalization: findings are generalized to theoretical propositions, not to populations [18]. Small numbers of participants are appropriate and often necessary when the aim is to understand a process in detail rather than to estimate its distribution across a population [17,19]. We therefore make no claims about newcomers or Iranian women in general. The account speaks to the experiences of the women who took part and what their participation reveals about how a settlement organization can make leisure accessible.

Two guiding research questions frame this study: How does a community-based settlement organization mediate Iranian newcomer women’s access to leisure and public life? How do gendered responsibility, transnational worries, and diaspora experience shape that process?

2. Literature Review

Critical migration scholars position migrants as active participants shaping their own communities [20,21]. Belonging is not simply achieved through employment, language acquisition, or formal service use; it is produced through institutional recognition, everyday encounters, and repeated opportunities to participate in social and cultural life [21,22,23,24]. Recent work on refugee integration in Canada similarly calls for shifting attention from what institutions expect of migrants to what migrants need to build livable, self-directed lives [24,25]. For the present study, this means examining the conditions under which Iranian newcomer women are invited, enabled, and supported to participate in the city around them.

Settlement organizations occupy an important but often less acknowledged position in this process. The literature recognizes the importance of language training, employment assistance, housing referrals, and service navigation, but their informal and relational work as community infrastructure remains less visible [10,24,26]. Nonprofit settlement organizations often mediate between immigrant communities and state institutions [27], and in neoliberal policy contexts they may absorb responsibility for immigrant well-being beyond formal mandates [28].

Over the last fifty years, Canadian research on leisure and ethnicity has contributed to our understanding of the leisure needs and preferences of immigrants, and reviews of this work continue to stress that ongoing research is needed as the immigrant population grows and diversifies [29]. Case-based studies in this tradition have examined how particular ethnocultural organizations sustain recreation for their communities, as in Karlis and Gravelle’s [30] analysis of the cultural recreation activities of the Hellenic Community of Ottawa. Antoun and Karlis [31] identify language, cultural difference, and everyday logistics as recurring constraints on newcomers’ leisure and direct attention to the role that organizations delivering leisure services play in addressing them.

Related questions have been examined across a range of age groups and migration generations. Writing about second-generation African Canadian adolescent girls in a community basketball programme, Haggar and Giles [32] offer an intersectional analysis of how gender, race, religion, and programme design together shape whether a young woman feels able to take part and draw attention to the role of the people running community programmes. While the participants in this study differ in age and in migration generation, the underlying focus is similar: whether culturally meaningful leisure participation is possible depends substantially on the organization and the people behind the programming.

In Ottawa, Canada, there are several organizations that provide services to newcomer women. In fact, leisure and community programming for newcomers is neither scarce nor tied to any single provider. The municipal government runs a wide range of recreational activities in the city, from aquatics and skating to fitness and the arts, with fee assistance available to low-income residents. The public library system offers free drop-in English conversation groups at branches across the city, several in the evening, and does not require registration. Among settlement organizations, a non-profit organization serving immigrant and racialized women delivers a weekly calendar of free activities with a playroom for children; a large multiservice organization programmes in dozens of languages across several sites and employs Farsi-speaking staff; the region’s oldest settlement agency pairs newcomers with established residents in mentoring relationships that often last for years; and the local branch of a national community-based sport and leisure organization offers newcomers information and services. First-language service capacity, meaning staff and programming delivered in newcomers’ own languages, exists in the settlement sector, but it occurs primarily in instrumental services such as counselling, orientation, and settlement navigation rather than in leisure programming. Settlement organizations are resourced for settlement outcomes, and leisure has not generally been counted as one.

What varies across these providers is not whether activities exist but the conditions that shape participation. Most settlement programming runs during weekdays, which makes it out of reach for women working full-time or in shift work. Fee assistance for municipal recreation is a significant benefit but requires familiarity with municipal systems to submit an in-person application.

Most leisure programming is offered in English and French and is aimed at immigrant women broadly, so it does not always reach newcomer women who are still more comfortable in another language or who are looking for something built around their own community as they navigate their first months in a new country.

This manuscript expands this discussion by exploring the landscape of a settlement organization and the types of services provided, including filling the gaps in terms of enhancing leisure promotion through trusted, linguistically accessible, and culturally familiar routes into public and cultural life.

An intersectional lens is central to understanding immigrant women’s leisure. Crenshaw’s foundational work established that women’s lives cannot be understood by isolating gender from racialization, class, migration status, institutional power, and other relations of inequality [33]. In leisure studies, intersectionality shows that access to recreation and free time is structured by overlapping social positions and by the uneven distribution of time, mobility, safety, resources, and recognition [34,35]. Women’s entitlement to leisure is also shaped by domestic labour, caregiving responsibilities, and social expectations [36,37]. For immigrant women, these gendered constraints intersect with migration, cultural unfamiliarity, language barriers, racialization, and the need to navigate multiple norms at once [38,39,40,41].

Social Capital and Cultural Infrastructure

Bourdieu [42] (p. 248) defines social capital as the aggregate of resources linked to the possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition. Two features of this account matter here. Such networks are not given but produced through the material and symbolic exchanges that establish a relationship and then keep it in being. Membership in a group also provides each member with the backing of collectivity-owned capital, so that what an individual can draw on exceeds what they personally possess. Bourdieu’s own examples are institutional settings that organize sociability over time, among them clubs, schools, and families. On this account, the volume of social capital available to a person depends both on the extent of the network they can mobilize and on the capital held by those to whom they are connected, which is why social capital tends to reproduce existing inequality.

Putnam [43] (p. 19) approaches social capital as a feature of communities rather than a possession of individuals, defining it as the connections among individuals, the social networks, and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. His distinction between bonding and bridging social capital is directly relevant to settlement. Bonding capital, generated within homogeneous groups, provides support and reciprocity among people who already share a position. Bridging capital, generated across social divides, connects people to wider networks and resources. Putnam argues that both are necessary and that they serve different functions: bonding capital undergirding specific reciprocity and mobilizing solidarity, and bridging capital providing linkage to external assets and information diffusion.

Examining infrastructure provides a revealing vantage for cultural analysis. In cultural policy scholarship, cultural infrastructure denotes the spaces and institutional frameworks through which culture is produced and consumed: museums, galleries, libraries, theatres, archives, studios, and the funding programmes that sustain them. Getzner [44] situates cultural infrastructure within the broader category of social infrastructure, noting that cultural institutions serve as public places for social exchange while also functioning as welfare-state infrastructure concerned with equal access to cultural events. Klinenberg’s [45] work on social infrastructure focuses on the physical places and social organizations that shape social relations, values and communication. Both studies attend primarily to provision: whether spaces exist, how they are funded, and who can reach them. Our findings point to a further condition beyond provision. As the summary of newcomer leisure provision above makes clear, Ottawa is well supplied with cultural and recreational spaces, most of them free or subsidized, yet the women in this study made little use of them. What stood between availability and participation was the work of mediation: rendering information in a language a woman reads comfortably, scheduling around the hours of availability, explaining how an unfamiliar setting operates, arranging for a child to be accommodated, and sustaining the trust that makes an invitation credible. We use cultural infrastructure in this manuscript to name this mediating function. Where Bourdieu treats the maintenance of a network as something its members do, and Putnam treats the associational setting as given, cultural infrastructure specifies the organizational work that produces the occasions on which both accounts depend. It extends the spatial concept in cultural policy toward the organizational practices that make cultural spaces usable, and it specifies, for a newcomer population, the conditions Klinenberg identifies as determining whether relationships form. Its defining feature is location: it resides within the organization rather than with the individual or the network, and it persists whether or not any particular person uses it.

This framing also anticipates variation. Bourdieu’s argument that social capital reproduces existing advantage implies that reliance on cultural infrastructure is not uniform. A woman who arrives with fluent English, professional credentials recognized in Canada, family already holding permanent residency, and the means to pay programme fees can enter public and cultural life through routes that require little to no organizational mediation. A woman without those resources may rely on the mediating work for more support.

Studies on Iranian women’s leisure reveal that participation is shaped by expectations around family responsibility, respectability, and women’s public participation [46]. Research on Iranian migrant women in Canada further shows that identity, autonomy, and empowerment are negotiated within gendered and migratory conditions rather than simply gained through arrival in a new country [47]. Mental health research on Iranian immigrants also points to migration stressors, sociopolitical context, and community connection as important dimensions of well-being [48]. Across this literature, the issue is not that immigrant women lack interest in leisure. Rather, they often lack reliable access to the conditions that make leisure feasible, including culturally safe spaces, flexible scheduling, affordable programming, transportation, and trusted social networks [49,50].

Transnationalism further complicates settlement. Migrants may inhabit transnational social fields in which obligations, worries, memories, and identities are distributed across more than one national context [51]. For Iranian women whose family members remain in Iran, homeland politics may be experienced not only through public activism but also through private worry, fatigue, grief, and moral pressure [15,16]. Within this context, leisure cannot be approached as a neutral activity category. It becomes one domain through which women may momentarily recover a sense of self, connect with others who understand similar concerns, and learn how to inhabit public and cultural spaces in Canada.

3. Materials and Methods

This manuscript draws on a larger community-based doctoral study on leisure, well-being, and belonging among Iranian newcomer women aged 30 to 55 in Ottawa, Canada. The broader study involved a leisure interest survey, three structured leisure activities, post-activity evaluations, field notes, and follow-up feedback consultations [52,53]. The present manuscript focuses on two data sources that directly address the organizational and cultural dimensions of leisure access: semi-structured feedback consultations with two Iranian newcomer women who participated in all three leisure activities and a feedback session with a director of the settlement service organization.

This manuscript draws on a community-based, participatory approach. Working in partnership with a Farsi-language settlement organization, we explored settlement services and the kinds of leisure provision available to newcomers in order to identify gaps in leisure promotion and how they might be addressed. Within that partnership, we engaged with a settlement organization’s executive director and two community participants using participatory, narrative methods that integrated oral history and storytelling to understand leisure experiences and interests in their own words. Participatory, narrative methods focus on lived experiences and treat the sharing of personal stories as a way to gain insight in a study concerned with how leisure becomes accessible to participants rather than with measuring its distribution [54]. Narrative and storytelling methods of this kind carry a particular purpose. By foregrounding how people recount their own experiences, they treat the telling of a story as both a source of understanding and a form of participation in itself, one that can open space for reflection and for dialogue about what a community needs [54]. A storied approach draws on lived experience and a range of perspectives to bring participants into the work of making meaning, rather than fitting their words to categories set in advance [55]. Approaching the two women’s accounts this way allowed their own sense of what the activities meant, and of what they were looking for, to guide the analysis.

The study was conducted in collaboration with an Ottawa-based organization serving Iranian and Farsi-speaking newcomers [56]. The organization functioned as the main community partner for recruitment and communication in our study [56]. Its role was methodologically significant because access to leisure was shaped not only by the availability of activities but also by trust, language, cultural familiarity, and whether invitations came through a recognizable community channel. The design of this component follows from what the research questions probe. Both questions examine a process that unfolds over time: how an organization mediates access to leisure, and how gendered responsibilities and diaspora experiences shape that mediation. Capturing that process required accounts from participants who had experienced the full sequence of activities and could therefore share perspectives on any changes that occurred between the first activity and the third. Participants were recruited through the settlement service organization. Eligibility criteria required participants to be Iranian-born women between the ages of 30 and 55 who had participated in all three leisure activities organized as part of the broader study: a group walk along the Rideau Canal, a Classical Persian dance workshop, and a visit to the National Gallery of Canada. Two women met these criteria and agreed to participate in follow-up feedback consultations. Both were employed full-time, lived in Ottawa without extended family support nearby, and identified caregiving responsibilities, time scarcity, and transnational worry as central features of daily life. To protect confidentiality, no further identifying details are reported. The women are referred to by the pseudonyms Sahar and Shirin. A feedback session was also conducted with an executive of the settlement organization in the role of organizational representative.

The two participants were similar in some respects and differed in others, and both dimensions matter for reading the accounts that follow. Both were Iranian-born women in their thirties or forties, employed full-time, and living in Ottawa without extended family nearby.

This sampling strategy produces depth rather than breadth. Sahar and Shirin could describe how participation felt across a series and how their relationship with the organization developed through it, which single-activity participants could not. They cannot describe the experiences of women who attended once, or who were never reached at all. We treat their accounts accordingly, as a detailed case of sustained participation rather than as a sample from which claims about Iranian newcomer women in Ottawa generally can be drawn. This choice is consistent with qualitative traditions in which a small number of in-depth interviews is treated as a strength rather than a limitation, since a reduced number of participants supports the close, sustained engagement through which detailed accounts are generated [57].

Semi-structured feedback consultation sessions with Sahar and Shirin were conducted individually in Farsi, their preferred language, to support comfort and ease of expression. Consultation sessions took place virtually and lasted approximately one hour. Participants did not consent to audio recording. Accordingly, data were documented through detailed handwritten notes taken during and immediately after each feedback consultation. At the end of each session, the notes were reviewed with the participant to confirm accuracy and to ensure that the documented account reflected her intended meanings. Corrections and clarifications were incorporated before analysis.

The organizational feedback session was conducted via Zoom (version 6.3; Zoom Video Communications, Inc., San Jose, CA, USA) and documented through detailed notes. Questions focused on the organization’s approach to outreach, leisure programming, cultural responsiveness, community trust, organizational capacity, funding constraints, and recommendations for future programming. Quotations and paraphrased examples reported in this manuscript are drawn only from notes reviewed and confirmed with participants or the organizational representative.

Reflexive thematic analysis guided the analytic approach [58]. Analysis proceeded through repeated reading of the feedback session notes. This was followed by initial coding, development of candidate themes, refinement of themes in relation to the research questions, and member checking with the supervisor. Data analysis focused on how participants and the organizational representative described leisure, belonging, access, trust, gendered responsibility, community connection, and transnational stress.

4. Results

Iterative analysis produced four interrelated themes, summarized in Table 1. Together, the themes show that leisure participation was shaped by more than individual interest. It depended on the interaction of transnational emotional life, gendered responsibility, organizational trust, cultural familiarity, and the practical design of activities.

Table 1. Overview of themes.

Theme	Focus
Transnational worry, diaspora experience, and emotional settlement	How geopolitical context, ongoing ties to Iran, and family separation shaped everyday settlement and emotional well-being.
2. Leisure as emotional relief, identity restoration, and civic orientation	How the three leisure activities interrupted routine, reactivated valued identities, and supported practical familiarity with Ottawa.
3. The settlement organization as a mediating community structure	How trusted Farsi-language communication, cultural familiarity, and organizational networks transformed activities into accessible participation opportunities.
4. Designing belonging through practical supports	How childcare, timing, cost, transit access, clear information, and small group formats determined whether participation was genuinely feasible.

4.1. Transnational Worry, Diaspora Experience, and Emotional Settlement

Daily life for both participants was shaped by local settlement pressures and by ongoing emotional ties to Iran. Sahar explicitly identified worry about family back home as a persistent pressure, saying, “we are not relaxed.” This statement situates Iranian newcomer women’s emotional load within a transnational frame. Their settlement experiences in Canada were shaped partly by the cognitive and emotional work of maintaining concern for a homeland marked by instability, repression, and uncertainty [15,51,59].

The absence of extended family intensified these pressures. Sahar noted that all her family remained in Iran and summarized her situation as “just me here.” She added that the absence of family affected emotional support and motivation: “when you are alone, you don’t push yourself.” Shirin similarly emphasized that neither she nor her husband had extended family in Canada. In Iran, she could have relied on grandparents for childcare, but in Canada she brought her child to all three activities because she had no alternative.

These accounts show that family separation had emotional and practical implications. It reduced the informal care infrastructure that would ordinarily support women’s mobility, social participation, and capacity to claim time for themselves. Settlement therefore appeared not as a contained local process but as a life condition shaped by the geopolitical context, family separation, transnational emotional labour, and the gendered consequences of losing everyday support networks [14,15,16].

4.2. Leisure as Emotional Relief, Identity Restoration, and Civic Orientation

The three leisure activities offered different forms of relief and recognition. The group walk was valued because it was simple, low-pressure, and social. Sahar described exchanging numbers with one of the women during the walk and staying in touch afterward, a connection she spoke about with some pride. Walking side by side allowed conversation without the intensity of formal introductions, while the public outdoor setting made the activity feel accessible. For participants managing work, family, and settlement tasks, the walk offered a manageable way to be outside, speak Farsi, meet other women, and become more familiar with the city. As Sahar put it, the walk showed her that “Ottawa is not only work and bus.”

The Persian dance workshop offered a more culturally resonant form of relief. Sahar initially felt self-conscious but relaxed because the session was women-centred, Farsi-speaking, and facilitated with care. She explained that movement gave her energy after work and that dance reminded her of Iran and of “me before immigration.” Shirin, while managing her child nearby, said that dance reminded her of her life before marriage and motherhood and made her feel “alive for one hour.” In these accounts, dance was not only a physical activity. It was embodied cultural memory, self-expression, and temporary release from settlement-related role expectations. The relief participants described was not confined to these two women. Eleven women completed post-activity evaluation surveys following the dance workshop [52] and all reported enjoying the session, finding it easy to attend, and feeling good or happy while participating; eight said the workshop increased their awareness of leisure opportunities in the wider community. The dance held particular meaning because it is an integral part of Iranian culture and because the session was run for women, in Farsi, and in a familiar cultural setting.

The National Gallery visit connected leisure to public culture and place-based belonging. Sahar described the Gallery as her favourite activity because her background was in a creative field and art spaces felt like “home” [60,61]. She said the Gallery made her feel calm and inspired and reminded her that her working life did not define her. Leisure therefore helped reactivate identities diminished by settlement-related labour-market transitions, supporting continuity and self-recognition [40,41,47]. For Shirin, the Gallery mattered partly because it combined her own experience with her child ’s learning, which reduced guilt and made participation feel useful beyond herself.

Across the three activities, participants became more familiar with Ottawa. Leisure supported civic orientation in practical terms: participants discovered routes, free-entry opportunities, cultural institutions, and possible social connections. Belonging was not described only as a feeling. It was also practical knowledge of where to go, how to participate, and how to enter public spaces with less uncertainty.

4.3. The Settlement Organization as a Mediating Community Structure

In this study, the settlement organization did not simply advertise activities. It helped transform unfamiliar public and cultural spaces into socially supported opportunities for participation.

Trust was central. Sahar found the activities through the organization’s social media and trusted it more than unknown online accounts. As she put it, “I trust this settlement service organization more than random accounts,” and she added that clear, step-by-step information was what made an unfamiliar activity feel possible: “if I know exactly what happens, I go.” She valued Farsi-language communication and suggested that future materials be clear, visual, and step-by-step, including where to go, the address, the bus route, the cost, the language used, and what to expect. Shirin also valued recruitment through trusted Farsi-language channels and preferred WhatsApp and Instagram over websites. These accounts show that information is not merely promotional. It is part of the infrastructure of access.

The organization’s cultural familiarity reduced social risk. Sahar emphasized that shared language, shared immigrant experience, similar age, and the structure of the activities made connection easier: “I’m tired of starting from zero.” Shirin described connecting with women who shared experiences of immigration and raising children far from extended family. These findings align with research showing that ethnoculturally familiar spaces can support early belonging and mental well-being by reducing isolation and facilitating social participation [11]. Importantly, culturally responsive mediation did not keep women within a bounded ethnic community. It gave them confidence and practical tools to move beyond it, including into the Rideau Canal pathway and the National Gallery. The organizational representative also clarified why women-specific leisure programming matters. He noted that the organization had not previously developed specific activities for women and seniors, partly because of limited resources and capacity. The collaboration with the university created an opportunity to address this gap. He described women-focused programming as a form of empowerment rather than entertainment, especially for women whose confidence, social networks, or independence may be reduced after migration. He also noted that the organization’s existing partnership with a women-serving agency was confined to legal matters affecting Iranian women and did not extend to leisure programming, which is part of why the leisure activities filled a gap that established provision had left open.

4.4. Designing Belonging Through Practical Supports

Practical design features shaped whether leisure was genuinely accessible. For Sahar, the main barriers were time, energy, money, transportation, and social isolation.

Her statement, “If I can find a friend, I go. If not, I cancel,” shows that social connection was both a benefit and a precondition of participation. Her account suggests that the existence of an activity does not by itself bring an isolated woman to it. Small-group formats, reminder systems, buddy structures, and post-event communication channels may help sustain connection beyond a single occasion, though this study cannot establish how widely that applies. Sahar linked this directly to the effort of starting over without an established network, noting that she was “tired of starting from zero” and that motivation itself was hard to sustain alone: “when you are alone, you don’t push yourself.”

Childcare was central for the participant with a child. Shirin repeatedly expressed interest in future programmes that could include children or offer parallel children’s activities. She identified child-friendly design, advance scheduling, low cost, transit-accessible locations, weekend timing, and short duration as key conditions for participation. Both participants expressed that settlement and adaptation resources should reflect the real-life circumstances of working parents rather than assuming availability during standard weekday hours. Shirin conveyed how little free time she had left for anything beyond obligation. She described her weekday routine as having “no gap,” and said that after a shift “my body is finished.” For her, leisure was “important, but not possible always,” and she framed any activity she could attend as workable only if it was built around a child’s presence rather than assuming a child’s absence.

The organizational representative agreed that combining activities with child-friendly settings, such as library play hours, would allow women to participate without choosing between caregiving and community engagement. He also recommended combining education and leisure, for example, by teaching English through museum visits, music, or other culturally familiar activities. This approach recognizes that leisure can be woven into settlement support when skill development is embedded in enjoyable and culturally familiar contexts.

5. Discussion

In this case, community-based leisure programming appeared to strengthen well-being and belonging for the two participants when organized through a trusted, culturally familiar, and linguistically accessible settlement organization. Through the settlement organization’s involvement, these activities became supported pathways into public and cultural participation.

Trust was not incidental. For the two participants, it shaped whether they showed up, whether they felt safe when they arrived, and whether they connected with others once there. Participants trusted the activities because they came through familiar Farsi-language channels and through an organization already known in the community. This finding extends scholarship on settlement organizations by showing that trust can function as infrastructure, not simply as an interpersonal feeling [10,11,26,27,28]. Settlement organizations can expand newcomers’ practical relationships to the city by making unfamiliar places more legible and socially reachable. The findings also show that the participants did not lack interest in leisure. What they lacked was stable access to the conditions that make leisure feasible. Shirin described leisure as “time that is not duty” and as “breathing space,” a priority for mental health that was nonetheless not a practical priority in daily life. For women whose days are organized around paid work, caregiving, household management, and settlement tasks, access to such breathing space depends on conditions that are rarely present together. These accounts point toward understanding leisure access structurally rather than individually [62,63,64].

It is worth being attentive to the heterogeneous nature of immigrant women and their diverse range of experiences. Iranian newcomer women in Ottawa include former professionals, students, and women who arrived in differing social and economic circumstances. In turn, this may impact what leisure means to them, their leisure constraints, who they trust, and where they seek information. Barriers like language, transportation, time, and cost will impact individuals differently depending on their situation. Sahar and Shirin represent this diversity. While both faced constraints of time, cost, and transportation, these constraints operated differently in each life, and the same activity carried a different meaning for each of them. The gallery visit that restored a professional identity for one was valued by the other because it allowed leisure and parenting to happen together.

Variation of this kind impacts how organizational mediation could be understood. Uniform provision, offered on identical terms to everyone, tends to reach those whom it already suits. An organization with detailed knowledge of the community it serves may be positioned to receive feedback to adjust language, timing, format, and forms of communication. Provision across the city’s newcomer-serving organizations varies along these lines. The insights and perspectives of the women who participated in our study cannot demonstrate the full range of this variation, which is included in our discussion of study limitations.

The geopolitical dimension of the findings adds another contribution. Transnational stress was not separate from everyday settlement. It appeared in participants’ comments about family remaining in Iran, not feeling fully relaxed, and carrying worry into daily life. Locally organized leisure cannot change conditions in Iran. It can, however, create moments of recognition, collective presence, and emotional relief in Canada. In this sense, leisure may become part of a community-level response to forms of stress that are geopolitical in origin but lived in the routines of local settlement [15,16,51]. Leisure is therefore not peripheral to settlement. It is one domain through which pluralistic urban life can be learned and practiced.

6. Contributions

The findings contribute to discussions among policymakers working in newcomer settlement, leisure programming, cultural participation, and community capacity development (Table 2).

Table 2. Contributions to discussions on policy and practice.

Area	Contribution	Evidence from Study
Programme scheduling	Offer evening and weekend options, short sessions, predictable monthly formats, and advance notice so participation is realistic for women managing work, care, and settlement simultaneously.	Both participants identified time scarcity and exhaustion as central barriers.
Childcare	Treat childcare as a core access condition. Child-inclusive	Shirin attended all three activities with her child
	formats, parallel supervised activities, and family-friendly scheduling can determine whether newcomer mothers can attend.	because she had no childcare alternative.
Information as infrastructure	Explain how to get there, what it costs, what language will be used, and what to expect. Use trusted Farsi-language channels such as WhatsApp, Instagram, email, and community networks.	Sahar described step-by-step information as necessary for immigrant women to feel safe enough to attend something new.
Activity diversity	Support varied forms of leisure rather than one standardized model. Walking, dance, and gallery visits supported different forms of comfort, identity, sociality, and civic engagement.	Each activity created distinct value and reached participants differently.
	Fund and formally support the often invisible labour of community mediation, including relationship-building, translation, coordination, trust maintenance, and cultural interpretation.	The settlement organization may contribute beyond logistics by sustaining community trust and translating opportunities into accessible participation.

7. Limitations and Future Research

Several limitations should be acknowledged. Our analysis in this article draws primarily on two participant feedback consultations and one organizational feedback session, supplemented by the broader activity-based context of the larger study [52,53]. The findings are not representative of all Iranian newcomer women in Ottawa, all Farsi-speaking immigrant women in Canada, or all women who engage with settlement organizations. Both women attended all three leisure activities, so their perspectives may reflect a degree of openness toward community participation not shared by women who could not attend, attended only once, or were never reached by recruitment efforts.

The analysis also cannot capture the heterogeneity of the population from which the participants are drawn. Iranian newcomer women in Ottawa differ in class position, educational background, pre-migration occupation, and immigration status, and these differences shape both what leisure means and what stands in its way. Two accounts, however detailed, cannot represent that range. Future research could include comparative designs that examine how women in differing circumstances, including former professionals, students, and asylum seekers, relate to leisure and to the organizations that mediate access to it.

Future research could integrate the perspectives of women who wanted to participate in leisure activities but were unable to do so, since their experiences may reveal more entrenched barriers related to childcare, work schedules, transportation, health, household finances, or family expectations. A related demographic limitation concerns the availability and use of gender-disaggregated data on Iranian newcomer populations. Statistics Canada’s table on place of birth by gender and age includes relevant data for Iranian-born immigrants, but further analysis is needed to support gender-specific population comparisons by city, age, period of immigration, and settlement location [65].

The geopolitical analysis is also cautious. Participants did not provide extended political narratives, and the feedback consultations were not designed as an inquiry into political trauma or diaspora activism. Future research could examine how Iranian women in Canada experience homeland political events, family separation, diaspora community debates, and emotional identity across borders [59,60,61]. Such work would need to be carefully designed with trauma-informed principles and recognition of the diversity of perspectives within Iranian immigrant communities.

Finally, participants preferred not to be audio-recorded, so the analysis relies on detailed handwritten notes reviewed and confirmed with each participant. This approach respected participant preference and supported trust, but it may limit the possibility of more fine-grained discourse analysis. Future studies could offer multiple documentation options, such as audio-recording, participant-generated notes, voice memos, or follow-up member reflection.

8. Conclusions

Community-based leisure programming can become a pathway to emotional relief, social confidence, place familiarity, community attachment, and civic participation for Iranian newcomer women aged 30 to 55 when it is organized through a trusted settlement organization. Leisure mattered not because it replaced formal settlement supports, but because it addressed dimensions of settlement that formal indicators often neglect: loneliness, exhaustion, identity loss, unfamiliarity with the city, and the need for connection in a shared language and cultural setting. The settlement organization recruited participants, arranged logistics, communicated in Farsi, and functioned as a mediating structure that made leisure intelligible, trustworthy, and socially safe. Through this mediation, women entered public and cultural spaces not as isolated individuals navigating an unfamiliar city alone, but as members of a community with a shared language, a shared migration experience, and organizational support behind them.

For the participants in this study, settlement experiences could not be separated from the conditions of their gendered and transnational lives. Paid work, caregiving, household responsibilities, financial caution, transportation barriers, and worry about family in Iran shaped access to leisure. Under these conditions, leisure should not be treated as secondary or optional. It is one everyday domain where women may recover a sense of self, build social connections, learn to inhabit a new city, and come to feel that they too have a place in public and cultural life.