Indigenous Development
Community Leadership & Engagement
The Royal Roads Indigenous Development Program focuses on facilitating long term relationships and partnerships with Indigenous communities, governments, private corporations and educational institutions. Assisting Indigenous communities to develop sustainable and progressive learning communities highlights our approach to providing customized programs. These programs are developed collaboratively to enhance community engagement and the development of leadership and capacity building. Interactive post-secondary immersion sessions may be offered on campus to provide supported learning for indigenous students preparing to transition to the post-secondary environment.
In 2007 Royal Roads University partnered with a small remote Carrier community in central British Columbia to assist in developing the capacity to govern as part of their treaty preparations. A learning centre was established that enabled its members to learn how to use technology to access skills and knowledge, which meant for some finishing high school through distance learning and for others an opportunity to access external resources to assist with economic development, language acquisition, video and music production or documenting cultural practices.
Royal Roads Indigenous Development draws strength from the lessons learned from this community and other First Nations it has had the opportunity to work with. Understanding that conventional approaches to learning did not work, we introduced a de-institutionalized approach that focused on piquing individual curiosity and helping to develop ‘next steps’ by creating a sustainable, supportive learning environment. From this experience a series of strategies have been identified for engaging communities to define learning goals and strategies to address the challenges, barriers and inequities encountered.
As each community is unique there are no ‘preset formula’ that predetermine what these strategies may be, however, there are steps that can be taken to:
- Insure community driven goals and learning outcomes and strategies required to achieve them;
- Mobilize community strengths and assets
- Create equal partnerships between communities and stakeholders; and
- Manage conflicts between communities and others.
Potential areas for capacity development may include:
- Identifying opportunities for building individual educational and training resources,
- Identifying opportunities for accessing or enhancing technology for distance learning to address literacy issues through training and education,
- Identifying new and sustainable market economies using micro financing and micro franchising,
- Designing and creating resilient community strategies for improving emergency preparedness and response,
- Developing community engagement strategies for managing conflict and building agreements between communities and stakeholders, and
- Developing leadership programs for Indigenous community development in a post modern economy.
For more information on program development for your community or if you would like to learn more about participating in a learning community , please contact Wendy Drummond Cran.
