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2010 Network Gathering

Harvest: Page 1 of 2

Goals:

The Network Gathering had three goals:

Celebrating and reporting on our success.
Sustainability.
To re-energize around new plans.

Celebrating Our Success

Vancouver Learning Circle: Stewart Anderson

It’s been an interesting journey. There were no great successes, but good conversations. There was a good mix of people, although we didn’t meet as often as we’d hoped to.

Concepts:

Social enterprise – food – grease trails.
Community owned business.
Asset mapping.

We engaged people you’d never expect (e.g., people with knowledge about traditional food). The group was organic, never prescriptive. It’s been a good experience.

Victoria Learning Circle: Charles Horn

This Learning Circle has been about empowering individual members. It’s been a collective project. There is a need for a stronger support system (e.g., Aboriginal Chamber of Commerce). Progress is being made (terms of reference). Business is better when they have support networks. This Learning Circle provides mentoring and leadership skills. The Friendship Centre has been helpful.

Nanaimo Learning Circle: Charles Horn

The Nanaimo Learning Circle is dedicated to the Aboriginal Tourism Project. They’ve attached a Learning Circle to the program itself.

Regina Learning Circle: Bob Kayseas

The Learning Circle is involved with the Regina Food Bank, there’s been a lot of participation. The challenge has been trying to understand the purpose, what we could do together. We wanted to create something tangible.

Discussion created opportunity for people to work together. People from a broad range, government, venture capitalists.

We created four sub-groups:

Communications
Funding
Affordable Housing
Skills Training and Youth Capacity Development

It’s been a good experience and the Learning Circle has value. It takes a lot of work after the circle meeting is over to drag the circle forward.

Sault Ste. Marie Learning Circle: Derek Rice

There has been a lot of interest in this Learning Circle, it’s been very active. There has been a large variety of people involved in the circle.

They did an environmental scan.

A socio-economic snapshot.

The Aboriginal population is Sault Ste. Marie is 25%.

Lack of services.

Dispel beliefs and myths about dependency.

Analysis of housing

Mobility

Develop a cross-border cultural tourism experience.

Cultural mapping.

The biggest challenge has been what happens in between meetings?

Winnipeg Learning Circle: Greg Halseth

The circle has 7-14 participants, 60-70% of which are practitioners. There has been strong participation from academics.

The issues are housing, housing repair and maintenance.

Women’s Social Enterprise Learning Circle: Penny Irons

The Learning Circle cities were: Prince George, Prince Rupert, Masset, Fort St. John and Edmonton. All of the circles are saying the same thing.

Strengths:

Culture
Social Networks

Weaknesses:

Lack of childcare
Lack of self-esteem and confidence
Lack of technical skills
Lack of real support
Lack of money

The Learning Circle was interested because they provided an open space for people to talk to each other. Over the course of the circle, the conversations changed. They moved away from barriers to solutions focused conversations, generating business and social solutions.

Governance Learning Circle: Ray Gerow

This Learning Circle was not land-based but place-based.

Prince George is the number one city in Canada for crime.

UAS Prince George. They had an open-space process, they challenged people to attend. Ray has watched the UAS nosedive, it’s been over money.

The question is how do urban Aboriginal people govern their affairs? Our governance structure is deficit-based. People go to places who service the needy. They don’t have a holistic voice.

The UAS has become a pot of money.

Student Project: Max Aulinger

The project is about how food security issues were affecting single income households, especially Indigenous women. 43% of women live below the poverty line.

The definition of food security: access of all people at all times to food that is culturally relevant and nutritious.

Foods banks are primary support mechanisms across Canada. This project looks beyond food banks.

In Winnipeg there are three programs:

Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre (community meal program).
Community Gardens
Niichi Foods Co-Op

Day One Group Work

The participants were divided into three groups; academics, policy people and practitioners. They were asked two sets of questions to answer as a group.

Question Set One

What is the role of, rationale for, greater collective action in Urban Aboriginal Economic Development?
What should be the role(s) of current urban Aboriginal agencies?
How can we broaden the conversations?
1. Who?
2. How?

Question Set Two

What do you need to know to be more effective at UAED?
What are the best ways to share, access and disseminate this knowledge?

Question Set One: Academic Response

Notes

What is the role of, rationale for, greater collective action in Urban Aboriginal Economic Development?

Competition for research funding.
Implications for collaboration.
Academic <-- --> Community
- Collaboration directed toward policy development and practice – real tools
Opportunity for collective action with immigration communities.
- A larger voice
- Feedback
Creates conditions for better research
Cyclical/iterative research --> product to/of community
Managing expectations
Bridging the theory practice divide
Valuing community knowledge.
Collective action offers opportunity/ flexibility for planned development
To teach funders to make funded research more relevant
Commitment continuity and support vs. isolation
University as repositioning of practices.

What should be the role(s) of current urban Aboriginal agencies?

Being inclusive (women and youth)
Getting community to broaden horizons
Better understand issues
Empower the urban Aboriginal economic development agencies
Urban Aboriginal economic development
- Sponsorship
- Developing res
Repository
Involving the middle class
Maximizing economic impact to local economies
Networking to support:
- Urban Aboriginal economic development groups
- Community
Maintain culture and tradition

How can we broaden the conversation?

Involving the middle class.
EDO sabbaticals
Building up statistical literacy.
Increasing coordination between urban Aboriginal organizations.
Issue based
Horizontal approach

Narrative

One thing within the academic community is increasing when the research funding is tied to a strong community presence in our application. Quite literally, we need you. We will not successfully apply to SSHRC and other funding sources for research grants in the tight, competitive world, if we don’t have strong community partners and a really strong plan about how to do what we haven’t done really well before. That is, taking the stuff that comes out of the research and making it useful to the practitioner community and the policy community.

That was the first part, the idea of funding, from an academic point of view, which was entirely career oriented as an academic. How we get promoted, how we get funded - we need you. That’s really pragmatic and almost selfish, but the underlying principal is that work will project. The funding agencies are taken up. The notion that we all felt was true was that, especially in a field like this, not hard natural science, the right answers are already out there. They’re scattered, but they’re out there. We can’t invent them, we can’t scientifically discover them and deliver them. We have to go out and look and find and work. How do we do that? You have to work with policy. Policy has to do the same thing. You’ve got to go out and find them (the right answers) amongst the people who are actually struggling and doing things. That’s the rationale behind the funding agencies taking this approach and it’s also something that we as researchers should want to do anyway. Practice leads theory and practice leads policy.

Good answers are out there already. We as researchers need to find them, and then we need to turn them into something useful to the ninety percent of similar places and people who haven’t found the right answers. I love the story last time, two years ago, about the meeting you set up then. I remember how amazed everybody was about how state of the art that was. All the people in the room talked to you about that and said, “Gee, that’s just what we need!” Its right, it feels right, it feels good, it’s there. It’s just not everywhere.

We thought the notion of going beyond the urban Aboriginal community to take knowledge and information and work with communities beyond was important. To look at the circumstances of all women entrepreneurs or all people with housing needs within urban communities and so on had something to offer, greater collective action. The notion was that we can bring those folks in to a larger look at the problem and look for good answers, like in other communities. There is an example, an organization called the Women’s Entrepreneur’s Academy. There’s a really strong chapter in Saskatchewan. They are interested in working with Aboriginal Women Entrepreneurs. They’ve wrestled with the issue of women entrepreneurship, they haven’t done much with the area of special circumstances of Aboriginal entrepreneurship, they want to. If you took six people from the Women Entrepreneur’s Group in Saskatchewan and six of your ladies and put them together in a room, you could just walk out and close the door. You wouldn’t need to do anything, they would figure out what they wanted to do and they would learn an awful lot. This is more or less a summary of the notion.

So often what people do is, even if they do get community involvement, they go in, they do the work, they go back home as a researcher, the write they paper for the conference, if they’re lucky it goes into a journal and then they go on to the next thing. Again, we are now required to try and deliver back and we should! The notion is going back and forth – going out and getting knowledge, coming back and working with it, going back out to the communities and so on. One of my PhD students went to Rankin Inlet in Coral Harbor to look at caribou harvests to look at commercialized caribou products. Especially the nutraceuticals and health related products. She said, “I’m going to come back when I’m done and talk to you”. They had a chuckle and were so surprised and interested when she came back with a translator, the people just loved it. They gave her back more information than she came with. She came back with more information, mostly about how she was wrong! They suggested to her that she do it a certain way and she is.

Matching expectations, we do make these arrangements. The community has to understand on both sides, there are some things you can do and some things you can’t do. One thing that we talked about is what you can do with numbers. People may want an answer to a particular question but sometimes the information isn’t available or you can’t get it. You sometimes can’t answer a question. In general, if you’re going to work back and forth amongst these groups, there has to be some understanding of what the deliverables are – both ways.

As researchers, we’re going to find the best practices when we’re out in the communities. We’re certainly not going to find them in my office, I can’t even find the top of my desk!

If you work with research and academic process to identify some good questions, you work with the communities, you try and come back with some ideas of what people are doing, what people’s needs are and so on. It’s an action kind of activity. You go forward and it leads to something that continues on and with follow-up. There’s no reason in the world why it just needs to be research and why it can’t be action.

This is interesting, one of the people on the table for the SSHRC Aboriginal research project said that they “had a really narrow kind of detective way of looking at community, looking at Aboriginals and so on.” In many ways, many things that probably should or could have have been funded went through the screening process and were rejected for reasons that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. The idea would be the possibility (particularly in the Aboriginal case) of going to the people who do this approving and having a look at the kinds of criteria that they are applying in terms of effective research.

We were talking about the number of times in Saskatchewan, in the work that we’ve done on Red River Reserve, people have paid consultants to do the set-up. The set-up, the legal stuff, the structural stuff, the plans for the streets, all the stuff that goes in to getting the Red River Reserve put through in Saskatoon. It’s quite a lot of set-up. And yet, everybody is re-doing the work, over and over again. A large number of things that people do, especially in programs and things. But also, Bob mentioned, he developed his own First Nations fishing lake financial management act. He said, “I know that there are fifteen or twenty of these out there already”. He charges people. But instead of having a model financial management act, everybody does it over and over again. Maybe a university, perhaps the First Nations University or other places, could be a repository of things like that. “Can you make sure that if you have a repository, you also have a suppository to keep things out?”

Change of subject. What should be the role of current urban Aboriginal agencies?

I’m just going to quote, not much thought. The role being inclusive to women and youth, broaden your horizons, better understand the issues, reformulate.

The first urban circle meeting that we had, we had representatives from the Provincial Department responsible for Aboriginal barriers in Saskatchewan. And we had representatives from two or three federal programs within INAC and Health and HRDC. They said most of the time at the first circle people would say “You’re doing that? What do you fund? What kind of money do you have?” There was the sense that there were all kinds of lack of exchange of information. They were all quite impressed with what the others were doing at the session, but nobody knew what they were up to! The only person who knew was a lady from our ABC front desk that does the economic development program. She does both the Metis and the ABC grant stuff. She said, “I just keep my own list. Every time I hear something about where to get money, what the name of the program is, I just write it down.” Even the people running the programs didn’t know about each other!

Empower. The community should write the agency’s agenda and not some other policy. Urban development agencies, sponsorship, developing. That one escapes me. Anybody?

The repository comes back. We thought that this was really interesting, what Ray mentioned, the notion of the middle class – the Aboriginal middle-class, including him in the process. And the fact, the story he told, about how he in fact disappeared in agencies. Agency driven and funding, pursuit of funding driven. We all thought that it was pretty important right there, that there be a way.

Increasing the amount of technology available in your communities. There are Aboriginal Chambers of Commerce emerging. There are other things emerging here, maybe it’s more or less a circle at this time. Maybe it just takes conscious effort to go out and find Aboriginal business people and others and invite them personally to the circles. That’s what we’re going to try to do in Regina in any case, search them out and find out who they are. For those of you that know it, the corporate Aboriginal organization out of Toronto, Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business (CCAB). They have a good list of Aboriginal businesses, it doesn’t take much to find a bunch of Aboriginal businesses in your community or area.

On that note, I’m going to interject. The Aboriginal organizations could be empowered to have increased research capacity, training and so forth. But also a sponsorship role in that they facilitate contact for their clientele and also could play a role in developing programs.

I knew that there was something about developing programs, there had to be a bigger role but it got lost. We want that to happen, we specifically have a suggestion on how to do it. Networking to support and identify gaps and for communication. And there was a notion about culture and tradition, what makes the urban Aboriginal things different than, for example, immigrants.

How can we broaden the conversations?
Broadening the conversation to the middle-class came up again. This one is interesting, talking about ways of working and funding, again, speaking from the academic community. Finding out ways that we might be able to provide support and resources to not-for-profit or economic development organizations in the community. Either through exchanges of some kind. And interestingly, this one again builds into the funding programs that we as academics now apply for. There are only two new grants in the SSHRC structure available right now. Both specifically, there’s a line item where there’s an important black heading that states, “we will pay up to fifty percent of the salary of a person from a partner organization who works on the project”. Not as a university person, not as a corporate person, not as a government person, but of an organization – a community organization. If the issue is important enough to that organization, the organization wants to partner and its possible in-fact to make arrangements, knowing what resources are like in organizations today, it’s tough. This person is going to work more than fifty percent of the time now. They’ll still be at the organization but at least it’s an opportunity to bring people from the organization right into the research. There are other ways of doing it, governments and other big corporations go the other way. For example, the credit union does it. I’m not sure if there are things within the credit union or Peace Hills Trust, and I know the government, where staff can go off and work for something like the guiding part of employment, but that kind of idea, back and forth. The application is fifty percent.

Broadening the conversation between organizations. The idea that so much of what we do as organizations, towers versus ladders, kind of idea. That so much of what we do is driven by vertical kinds of organizations. Towers; starts with an objective and a structure and the idea that an awful lot of it could benefit from cross-work as well. Matrix design structure as opposed to hierarchy.

An example of that is an affordable housing for Aboriginal people. Workshops, for example, in Saskatoon, that brought together construction industry, economists, bankers, Aboriginal organizations. So, cross-cutting through all of these different spheres and surprisingly, that was the first time that they had gotten together to discuss common issues. So, that’s just one example.

Question Set One: Policy Response

Notes

What is the role of, rationale for, greater collective action in Urban Aboriginal Economic Development?

Isolation and creates silos
Place-based policy
- Take back
Greater Collective Action
- Bring child care workers and social workers in
Facilitating development of economies of reciprocity and shared interest (no limit on scale)
Moving from needs based to opportunity based.

What should be the role(s) of current Aboriginal Agencies?

Guidance tools – mechanisms funded by Federal and Provincial Government.
Need action – voices need to be heard.
Stove piping hurting us
Government funding should focus more on a business perspective/ partner with business.
Huge task ahead.
More partnerships. With who?
More networks/collectives.
Pull together silos to work together.
Sharing best practices.
Ability to navigate more effectively
Per to pull together a group
Strength, comfort in numbers

How can we broaden the conversation? Who? How?

Aboriginal organizations developed to manage organization finance reports.
- SAGE – bring them in.
Develop our business mind-set.
Can’t be dependent on Government.
Bring more business minded thinking.
Social Enterprise Experts
Foundation Community/ Com Bands
Creation of new community investment.

Narrative

We’re going to appropriate everything that they [the academics] said and turn it into an abstract. So quickly, we, at the beginning of this discussion kind of probed the source of these questions and determined that it was Charles who had the Machiavellian plot behind it and that he was having misgivings about the word governance because a lot of this speaks to governance. So, in a non- governance and to avoid bad governance, we would suggest that the following might be useful, from our policy perspective. We see value in having frameworks and institutions that can help enable collectives particularly where they can benefit from some prepared ground. In the sense of having mentors, having capital or access to capital, having capacity building, all those good things, the elements that collectives can grow on. I think also, we recognize that as a role of policy in promoting those collectives is to remove some necessary barriers that have shown up. Sometimes a policy that we promote will actually galvanize the community and they will react inappropriately, perhaps, from the policy point’s perspective, but it does bring people together. So, not to say that bad policy is good but at least policy should recognize that it has the ability to remove barriers, it should whenever it can do so. Also, we feel that there are certain social pre-conditions. In other words, don’t just focus the collectives that are on the economic job skills training end of the, think about the beginning of it. How do people get on that road to success? How can collectives be enabled at that end? Not just on the how many economies, how many jobs?

I think we also recognize that sometimes policy can sometimes be monocular or telescopic. It can have a very close and self-interested frame. I think that in our group here, mention was made that societies and economies that collectives might help to generate, need to take a pluralistic point of view on it. I’m not about to try to explain that but I’m going to turn to Rupert and he can expand on it if he so wishes. I think it’s just to say that it needs that broader perspective. I think too, there was the idea that there needs to be a leveling of the playing ground. That one encourages collectives because otherwise you’re excluding them. We talked about that for quite a while. It wasn’t that we were putting anything down; we were talking through the heterogeneity, the uniqueness that the non-standard approach, the differential successes that you will have and no policy can over-arch that. There’s no uber-policy, that’s the wrong thinking.

As far as the second part, the roles, the current agencies, what can they do? Be inclusive. Be collaborative. Reduce inter-agency competitiveness. We had an examples that we were talking about in Winnipeg, there are groups that are working independently but still with that collective mind. I think that what we could do is encourage a wish to be self-supporting. We recognize that some communities – not Aboriginal communities necessarily, although there are probably some success stories – other communities that have an ethnic bonding and they do self-support. They self-sustain. They shop their own economies. They support their entrepreneurs. How do you encourage that kind of, presuming that the product and the services are of equal value and there’s not some kind of differential set aside. Because that will include both the building of their economy, but build that sense of cohesion. So that should be supported.

Broaden the conversation. I have a singular – and of course it’s my idea, none of these other guys thought of it – I think we need to write a SSHRC grant to fund Ray’s blog spot. Ray will get out there and just talk them into a corner, or a circle, or some other state. In all seriousness, I think that this question has basically already been answered when we reflect upon what people have said about the first and the second [question]. Basically we want to broaden, bring in the folks that are now out of the room. Bring in the folks that left the conversation because it just became too focused on jobs, or it just became too focused on skills training, or it became focused on something that didn’t bring in people’s general interest. That probably helped a lot.

Cheryl raised the point of the importance of being inclusive, being holistic about what we mean by the economy. That the economy is always being made up in Canada, of the state centre, the private business for-profit centre and the third, social economy centre. We heard in the learning circle reports, quite a lot around the importance of social enterprises as well as the importance of supports to business entrepreneurs. Now we are seeing this blending around social enterprise, social economy, social entrepreneurship. If policy doesn’t explicitly support that, in terms of Aboriginal peoples in urban settings, it will miss a whole chunk of the economy. It’s actually really, very important to address social economic outcomes for Aboriginal people.

Question Set One: Practitioner Response

Notes

What is the role of, rationale for, greater collective action in Urban Aboriginal Economic Development?

More effective voice
A way to learn more (i.e., social enterprise examples)
Assists with project and funding applications
Opportunity for coordination of action
Path to effective action
Opportunity to move from crisis to strategic planning
Better work, projects, policy
Expand ‘inclusiveness’
- Most vulnerable
- Most invisible
Cross-cutting solutions
- Housing
- Place-based policy

What should be the role(s) of current Aboriginal Agencies?

Greater participation by community base and organizations
- For insight/ opportunities
- For basic start-up funding
Practitioners to participate more with community organizations
Practitioners move --> more than engagement
More communication
- More engagement
- Emails etc.
Share knowledge
- Before trying to engage Aboriginal agencies
Realities of survival
- Organizations have crisis and immediate needs
- Eg. Third party management frees up managing and focus more on immediate needs.

How can we broaden the conversation? Who? How?

Competition
Needs supportive capacity (especially for community based groups)
Must grow beyond mandates/ jurisdictions
Overcome silos/ stove pipes
Must add a wider circle of potential partners
Opportunities and challenges of the learning Circle stories.

Narrative

Talking about the role and the rationale, we talked about coming out of this with some guidance tools to be given to various levels of governments. Because people want to hear about these discussions and who, you want people with money to hear about this. In this case it’s the governments. You want them participating and you need to access them. You need action, voices need to be heard. I’m not a policy guy or an academic, I’m not really clear on stove-piping or herding us, maybe somebody else can talk about that. Are we talking like silo type stuff? Those are things that have been, certainly provide a challenge in these types of things. I sort of wrote myself a little note as I was thinking about this, I don’t need it, it’s good. It’s just sort of following a flow of what people have to go through or what groups are out there and stuff like that. Trying to draw a little work chart in my head so that I can understand what this is and you get a lot of circles. It’s a very complex environment and the continuation of these types of things need to continue in terms of getting a greater collective action.

Government funding, this was a note that I made. I was talking about what I’ve seen some First Nations who approached their decision to become involved in government funding as a business. They go to government, they say, “You know what? These are our services. Do you want to buy them off of us?” Rather than saying “we need you to fund these things for us”. It’s a different mindset from that perspective. It’s sort of starting to change around a little bit. I also see it because I work with a lot of different First Nations communities across the country, when they go into third party, everybody thinks that’s a huge crisis. It’s not. It creates challenges, to a certain extent but it’s not a bad thing. What I’ve seen in Saskatchewan is that some of the communities don’t want to come out of third party because they don’t want to be the people writing the social assistance cheques, they don’t want to be the people deciding what kind door knob to put on people’s door. It’s empowered Chief and Council to go out and do more things that they’re able to do. It directly impacts – especially in Saskatchewan, I’m most familiar with it – a lot of those communities in Southern Saskatchewan have a huge off-Reserve population and they pay attention to that. If you have three hundred people living on-Reserve and twelve hundred people living in Regina, you’ve got to pay attention to the twelve hundred voters that you’ve got in Regina. That’s something that is happening out there.

Huge task ahead – more partnerships, more networks, collections. This is a huge, huge task. We talked about an uber-policy, there are so many things. It goes back to my little flowchart, what I was trying to get at for myself in terms of pulling it together. I mean, there are so many issues, so many different people, so many different things getting together. It’s hard to put it all together. I know that last time, when we did this two years ago I think that there was one Chief in the room, if I remember correctly, and he came here by mistake. In Vancouver, he was in our session for two or three hours before he realized that he was in the wrong meeting! He was like, “Where’s my honorarium?” So, you want to be all-encompassing, but at the same time there’s strength in having focus. I think that this is something to be considered when going forward, too.

Overcoming silos, to work together, sharing best practices… it is funny when you deal with the government and you talk to different departments and they don’t share amongst themselves. Heck, I work for a small bank and sometimes we don’t share amongst ourselves. You’ve got to have these meetings to get up to speed with what we’re doing.

The ability to navigate more effectively, persons pull up together in a group. Strength, comfort in numbers. Ray – keep on trucking. I think that it’s a good sense of what this needs to do. This group is important. It does needs to continue. It needs to have a voice that has to be heard somewhere.

What is this? Which one is this? Where am I? We’re still on the first one. Policy, isolation, creates silos. Place based policy. Take back. Now, again, I’m not a policy person. I’ll go to the lady who mentioned this term here and maybe you can explain it to me. “I’m saying that in the urban setting there’s an integration of interests and activities and mandates, etc. What needs to happen is for governments to push the policy decision making out into those communities first instead of having it sit in line and not necessarily taking into account community interests. It’s a group like this that can act collectively, can have more close.”

Greater collective action. This was my comment. Bring child care workers, social workers in. My point was, when I said this, I was the Band Administrator for my band for a while. We had a one-hundred million dollar budget a year. Ten million of that went to social assistance and almost another ten million went to child care! We did twenty million dollar a year business raising our adults and raising our kids, in a not-so-pleasant environment. I relate it to Residential School, we have more First Nations kids in group homes now than we ever had in Residential Schools. We’re doing it to ourselves. My comment was to bring these workers in to this environment because they need to hear about these discussions. Their mindsets need to change too because they protect their jobs and they live by a rule book. They operate in that way and mindsets need to change. Both of those particular things are run by acts, usually provincial acts. It’s complicated because its Provincial acts, Federal money. Those acts need to change to incorporate social enterprise. Unless you change the direction of that money, that money is always going to go towards those purposes. In order to change that direction of that money, you need to change those acts. I strongly believe that social enterprise is the way to go, whether its on-Reserve or off-Reserve. The off-Reserve stuff bleeds heavily into the cities or to towns.

Facilitating development of economies of reciprocity and shared interests, no limit on scale. I didn’t write that sentence, so what does that mean? “I don’t know, I just wrote it, it made sense when he said it.” “Facilitating development of economies of reciprocity, regardless of the scale. We hear that term thrown around ‘economies of scale’ and my thought was economies of reciprocity regardless of scale and shared interests.” This didn’t come up in conversation, this came up by way of the note directly to the writer.

Moving from a needs-based scenario to an opportunities-based scenario and then dealing with the second questions, roles. We talked about greater participation by community based and organizations for insight, opportunities for basic start-up funding. This outlines some of the challenges, there are many organizations out there but they’re limited by fiscal realities to be able to participate in a lot of these types of things and they also have a job to do. They’ve got deliverables that they’ve got to meet. There was further discussion, I don’t think it was written down anywhere, but I think it relates to this, government funding in terms of how it works. You mentioned some youth funding that only comes in six months after the year starts. You get a year’s funding but you have to spend it in six months. You have six months of not being able to do anything. The correlation to that is my home community, we get little stars on our reports from INAC because we are good winter home builders. That’s because they don’t fund us until October! They say, “you have to have your capital plan in” and then they review your capital plan and they say “okay, well it’s just about time to have your audit done, let’s wait until you have your audit”. It’s just a whole bunch of these things, boxes, they have a set rules. They have to tick these boxes. If the boxes aren’t ticked, the money is not going to flow. The irony behind that is, you’re not allowed to build a house in the summer unless you fund it yourself. They could do a lot of that but the INAC capital dollars wouldn’t flow until October. Sometimes you’ve got to come to a bank to get there.

Practitioners participate more with community organizations. I think that practitioners, more than engagement. I’m assuming that means maybe some champions coming out of the group and spreading the message.

More communication, more engagement, emails, etc. This type of information needs to get out. What are we doing here? What are we talking about? What are the issues? Share knowledge before trying to engage Aboriginal agencies. Realities of survival. Organizations have crises and immediate needs. We talk about the challenges that they have, coming to organizations like this. Third party management, frees up managing so that they can focus on immediate needs. That was the example that I told you about First Nations who are not so interested in getting out of third party.

Talking about broadening the conversation. Aboriginal organizations developed to manage organization financial reports like SAGE. David mentioned, there is an organization out there who is in the business of helping you do your reports and helping you to prepare your proposals going into different levels of government. To me, that makes a ton of sense. You guys are probably all like this, who manages your health care benefits? You get it provided to you, but when you go to get it, its work. I often think to myself, “wow, I have to do all these things to claim my money back. It’s a pain in the butt, especially if you have an ex-wife who’s claiming stuff over here, stuff like that”. Focus! SAGE sort of picks up on that type of scenario and I believe it to be a good business and a good service for small organizations. When I was the Band Administrator, I was very lucky, the band was very good. Most of the administrators in the program were all very good at doing reports and doing things like that. It made life so much easier.

Develop our business mindset – can’t be dependent on government. Bring more business minds, thinking in. We talked about social enterprise experts, foundation community, creation of new community investments. This one here, tribal social welfare acts need to be changed. Access to business in the non-profit world. These are our points that came in very late, added by Stewart and they interested me to a great deal because it talks about raising money to invest into the communities and community bonds. Heck, I’m really interested in that because where is it at? Is it something that’s off the ground yet? It’s an interesting aspect, to see if you have some well-heeled individuals who are prepared to fund organizations that are going to do social enterprise for example.

Question Set Two: Academic Response

Notes

What do you need to know to be more effective at UAED?

Operational transparency
Need to know the research needs of UAED community
Ethics and values
- Socio-economic ethics and values of community
Linking to outside knowledge
- Mobilization
Measuring the demand within specific sectors – collaboration between academics and initiative players
Is a development idea valuable
- Pros
- Challenges

What are the best ways to share, access and disseminate this knowledge?

Feasts
Plan language publications
- Online
- Offline
Give opportunities for community to invest in research objectives
Online clearinghouse
Media
- APTN
- Venture Forth
Aboriginal “Dragon’s Den”
Specifically and intentionally link to an urban Aboriginal community
Youth
- Social media
- Mentorships
Handbook of best practices
Aboriginal cooperatives
Cooperation among cooperatives

Narrative

We think that brevity is important. We talked a little bit about the first question in the context of operational transparency. We talked about the need to know research needs of the UAED community. You folks may not be surprised, but many people would be surprised by the amount of research that gets done by scholars who don’t actually know what they’re doing when they first get into the research context. This is important. We talked about ethics and values, socio-economic ethics and values of community.

Linking to outside knowledge mobilization, measuring the demand within specific sectors, collaboration between academics and initiative players, is a development idea actually viable, kind of the pros and challenges. When we first got this question, our first question back was “what the [heck] are you asking us for, we’re academics. We don’t think about this kind of stuff.” We’re supposed to think big picture and you guys are supposed to take it and run with it and be happy. It doesn’t work that way. And then we woke up! It’s funny how that works, we give you our opinion whether you want it or not.

In terms of sharing, we talked about theses a lot. Plain language publications in particular because very often academics get quite technical in the language that we use. Some academics go so far as to think that it makes them smarter to use more specialized language, when in fact it just makes it tougher to read. Plain language publications are quite important, off-line and physical publication. But also, online is really important as well, as the kids are saying these days. Give opportunities for community to invest in the research objectives. It’s much easier, if you look at what Environics did with their statistics, they got buy-in or people together brought buy-in. So you have all these different groups now that are kind of waiting anxiously for the city specific data to come out. If you can get the various communities to invest in the project as you’re doing it, it makes it easier for people to take it up once it comes back out. Train students through placements. We talked a little bit about online clearinghouses in particular. For example, one of the things that we’re starting to talk about with Wichitowin in the city of Edmonton is to talk about the amount of grey literature that exists out there by all the different services deliverers that you can’t find online and you can’t find in Universities or city libraries. So we’re talking about how we can digitize that in such a way now that we can digitize it, scan it, put it online, create a database for people to go in and take a look at this kind of stuff.

We talked about various types of media that people talked about before; APTN, Venture Forth. We talked about how to get the middle class involved, we talked about an Aboriginal “Dragon’s Den”. We put the quote marks around the Dragon’s Den so that you can suppose it’s the show and not an actual dragon’s den. Thank you for clearing that up. I don’t assume that we all know what that means! Specifically and intentionally links to community youth. We got into the ideas around social media again but mentorships, best practices, Aboriginal cooperatives and cooperation among cooperatives. This sort of links back to what we were talking about, the last generation where you have different organizations that are doing a lot of really good stuff and they don’t necessarily know that other organizations are doing the same stuff and that they might be a more effective or efficient way to do it. Then we called it a day.

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