Notre histoire

The pilot, envisioned as a complex brokerage model between interpreters and their clients (social service and volunteer agencies), grows into a full-fledged service renamed the Metro Cultural Interpreter Service (MCIS).

Following a year and a half in crisis, MCIS’ funding is temporarily resumed.

Lack of interpreters’ education on working within the criminal justice system as it relates to domestic violence cases leads to a grant to pilot the Domestic Violence Court Project Cultural Interpreter Program. This program trains interpreters to work with service providers who support victims of domestic violence accessing the criminal justice system at designated domestic violence court houses at Old City Hall, North York and Durham, and hospitals participating in the Domestic Violence Project in the Greater Toronto Area and Durham.

The organization’s first Executive Director, Sandra Larsen, is hired and expands interpreting services to General Welfare clients and displaced workers through Ontario’s Labour Adjustment Strategy (LAS).

MCIS incorporates and moves its first office from the Town Centre Court to a location in north Scarborough.

MCIS Language Solutions is a non-profit social enterprise committed to removing language barriers.

Multilingual Community Interpreters Services (On) begins as the Scarborough Cultural Interpreter Pilot Project (SCIPP), with support from the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship’s Wife Assault Prevention Initiative (WAPI).

Latha Sukumar is appointed Executive Director in September 1996. She forms an Advisory Committee and rallies for continued funding at a critical time when MCIS faces uncertainties that could determine the organization’s future direction. Interpretation services will soon expand to 21 languages from the original 8. At this time, MCIS has 40 interpreters.

The Founding Board renames the agency again as Multilingual Community Interpreter Services (On) (MCIS) with a mission “to ensure equity and access to services for members of various ethno-racial communities” and to divest it from its host organization, Human Services of Scarborough (HSS).

As its services expand, MCIS successfully applies to be lead agency on a grant to build a web-based interpreter scheduling system to be used by all language interpreter services funded by the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration (MCI) across the Province. MCIS has grown from 2 to 6 FTEs and 24/7 coverage.