Rediscovering Pride

"For young people to see their parents, older brothers and sisters, and older relatives working, it's a good example. That's all we look for, to make it better for our children and our grandchildren."
"But certainly for the ones that have the capacity, we should be finding ways to get them to work ... Hopefully down the road people can truly look after themselves without that extra push, and that's where we want to get."
Chief Wayne Semaganis, Little Pine First Nation reserve

The reserve is located about 90 kilometres southwest of the city of Lloydminster, Alberta. There are 600 reserve residents, living on the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan. And like most such reserves there is mass unemployment. The band council has long been accustomed to paying unemployed band members welfare. And then someone had a brilliant idea.

A program was initiated, operated co-jointly by the band and the federal Northern Affairs Department. It began with people encouraged to produce resumes which were then collected and distributed in the relatively near geography to prospective employers. Job training was offered to anyone who wanted to learn or to improve a marketable skill.

The situation prevailing was that band members who were skilled and assured employment were unable to accept offers because they lacked the necessary equipment to start out or had no way of transporting themselves to the locales where the employment was being offered. Within the reserve about 70 people were singled out eager to work and who had jobs waiting for them. What they needed was fairly elemental.

Steel-toed safety boots to enable them to safely work on a Husky Energy project job site, for example. And a means of getting to the site. So the reserve bought two buses and two shuttle vans and enough boots to go around. And when those 70 band members were gainfully employed, others in the band became interested. Another 30 band members have since found work outside the band.

FotoliaSteel-toed construction boots have made a huge difference on Little Pine First Nations reserve.

 

Work in the retail sector or within hospitality industries in regional communities that were now accessible to them is earning band members more money to live more comfortably than their welfare cheques ever did. The end result was predictably, a cut in the reserve's welfare roster by a third of welfare recipients.

Chief Semaganis was signing over 400 welfare cheques a month when he first became chief four years earlier. Now that number is slightly over 100 cheques monthly.