Building Our Legacy Together: leadership comes home
Prince George, BC
This week I’m here in Prince George, smack dab in the middle of British Columbia facilitating a two day roundtable conference on economic opportunities for Aboriginal communities. There are people all over BC here, and we’ve been treated to a performance tonight from Juno nominee (and new friend) Marcel Gagnon as well as tastings of the wines of Nk’Mip, North America’s first Aboriginal winery.
As fun and interesting as all this is, today’s proceedings were stolen by several acts of overwhelming generosity. It all began in the evening news part of our program, during which I invited people with anything to share – projects, ideas, partnerships.
One of the groups in attendance here are the executive of Building Our Legacies Together, the youth network I have been working with over the past couple of years. The youth forum in Fort Rupert last month was planned by them. They received a little planning money from the federal government, but then locally they raised funds to hold these forums. They are now embarking on bringing this forum model all over BC. It is a two and a half day event whereby we line up inspirational speakers, rappers, and other musicians to do an evening of fun, and then launch them into a day and a half of Open Space to work out small scale local solutions to the issues they face.
So the coordinator of this most excellent scheme, my friend Crystal Sutherland, rose today to give her pitch. She began by introducing herself in her language and recited her connections to her families and clan at Ahousaht on the west coast of Vancouver Island. She quickly told the BOLT story to these leaders and then cleared her throat and said “Now here’s the hard part: we need money. We raise local money to hold these forums and we need money to put these on around the province.” She invited people to get in touch with her if they could help.
Without dropping a beat a man from Campbell River stood up and pledged $500 from his organization and challenged other Aboriginal development organizations to the same. Within five minutes there was $3000 dollars in the bank and then Chief Shane Gottfriedson of the Kamloops Indian Band rose to say that he would be happy to host a forum, that the youth would have the pick of the facilities in his community (including a new meeting centre and their new school gym) and that the band would take care of all the food while the youth were there. By the end of evening news, ten minutes later, the youth had cash, a host for their next forum in Kamloops and two other offers for the same.
And, as one leader said in rising to pledge his stake, it was all about respect and the way these young people came to ask for funds with a track record of work and with integrity and honesty in their request. Real leadership recognizes real leadership.
If you want to add to the pot, supporting the work of these young leaders, drop me a line (chris at chriscorrigan.com), or leave a comment and I’ll hook you up.
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