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Walking WITH Canadian Indigenous Partners March 6, 2006
Reflection by Beth Baskin, PWRDF Public Engagement Coordinator
"...it is the quality of our partners, our staff support, and the trust of the network that allows PWRDF to take risks, to begin at the very beginning with good ideas and to walk with partners as the ideas develop and grow."
The work of The Primate's World Relief and Development Fund is sometimes described as a web or woven cloth. These images are used because there are many strands of work that come together to make the whole. As staff we can sometimes visualize the whole, but it is rare that we actually get to see more than one or two strands at a time. As part of my orientation as Public Engagement Team Leader I will have the opportunity to be engaged with each of our five areas of development work over the next eighteen months, often in this orientation I will visit one partner in one location and try to extrapolate larger learnings from that solitary experience. I was honored to be a part of a planned Canadian Development Program event that brought many partners together and allowed me to see how the strands are woven together already and indeed how they were being woven as we met.
From February 23 to 26 The Canadian Development Program gathered eleven partners together at The Bear's Inn on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario. This Indigenous People's Gathering was an opportunity for the separate partners to come together and tell the stories of their communities and programs within the hearing of others whose work often echoed the same concerns. Phone numbers and email addresses were exchanged and plans made to share information on an ongoing basis. Synergies were formed between the Nuu-chah-nulth Economic Development Corporation Language and Culture Program in B.C. and the Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa located south of Montreal. The Nishnawbe Aski Nation, with whom the idea originated, shared their Girl Power program and the challenges of working in 49 separate communities spread across Northwestern Ontario.
The formal program time was divided into thirds. The first third was story telling, as each partner presented their unique work. Out of these stories the group drew four themes; Language & Culture, Health, Education, and Women/Youth. Key issues and questions were named with small groups being established to explore the conversations further. The generation and exploration of these themes was the second third of the weekend. The final third focused on Inter-Indigenous Partnerships and next steps for the Canadian Development Program. We heard stories of partnerships that spanned the province, the continent and the world.
As part of the formal program Indigenous Culture Media Innovations was present to record the proceedings visually and took time in the evenings to record the interviews of several partners conducted by Canadian Development Program staff person Jose Zarate. These interviews captured the specific history of the project supported by PWRDF, the kinds of support PWRDF had or is providing to the project and some dreaming about what shared next steps might be.
Within these interviews and through the story telling I heard partners repeatedly state how much they appreciated PWRDF's presence at the beginning of the project. In many, many cases PWRDF was the first funder of a project that then enabled the partner to leverage additional funds. In other cases it was the ongoing support and availability of staff that enabled partners “to begin where they were and move at their own pace without artificial deadlines & unrealistic expectations�. PWRDF in all cases had partnered a grass roots organization like Kainai Alcohol Related Brain Injury Committee on the Blood Reserve in Alberta or a brand new project coming out of an existing relationship like the 2002 World Indigenous Peoples Conference on Education hosted by First Nations Adult and Higher Education Consortium (FNAHEC). Partners thanked PWRDF for enabling them to lead the process and do the work with strong support and minimal interference.
In my work this fall & winter I was often questioned about how much money PWRDF gave to specific projects, what percentage of their overall budget was it, how much of what Canadian Anglicans donate actually gets to the partner? These questions are important and I am seeking tangible ways of answering them, but the stories I carry away from this weekend are enough to tell me that the quantity questions are really secondary, that it is the quality of our partners, our staff support, and the trust of the network that allows PWRDF to take risks, to begin at the very beginning with good ideas and to walk with partners as the ideas develop and grow. A formal report will be coming from The Canadian Development Program in the near future. I look forward to sharing my stories and experiences with you and in the meantime ask that you continue to Act, Give, and Pray to support The Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund as we collectively work throughout the world.
