By the Community, for the Community

By Kara Passey, 2nd year MDP student

Throughout my learning in the MDP program, I have had many opportunities to learn more about our responsibilities to the land and original peoples of Treaty One territory, including the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, Dene peoples, and Métis. During my first field placement I worked with Pauktuutit, the Inuit women’s association of Canada, and learned about the unique experiences created by the colonization of the Arctic, and how these events continue to impact Inuit wellbeing and sovereignty today.

I wanted to expand this learning and gain practical skills, and I found this opportunity within Winnipeg at the head office for Arctic Co-operatives Limited, the southern hub for the administrative activities needed to run the many co-operative businesses run in 32 different Inuit and Dene communities in Canada’s arctic. These businesses include grocery and retail stores, hotels, gas services, cable and internet services, art purchase and distribution to the south, and more.

Kissarvik Co-op in Rankin Inlet

When the fur market crashed and HBC posts officially closed in the Arctic in the 1940s, Inuit were left unable to return to their traditional ways of life, and unable to access the new European goods they had become dependent upon. This resulted in a large number of Inuit who were dependent on government subsidies and supports for survival, and so the need to strategize an approach which provided goods and services to the community as well as sustainability was imminent. The first Inuit co-operative businesses were incorporated in the 1960s, and the Canadian Arctic Co-operative Federation (now known as Arctic Co-operatives Limited) was officially incorporated in 1972. This enabled arctic co-ops to consolidate their buying power for the purchase of products for their retail stores and to also provide services such as accounting, audit, training, and management support to help the co-operatives to improve business efficiencies. Arctic Co-ops is now approaching 50 years of business, and continue to open new hotels, and explore other opportunities for growth in their partnering communities.

My role was within the Communications and Marketing department, where I had the opportunity to work with various departments across the organization on both internal and external communications. This position allowed me to take what I have learned from MDP and apply it in a practical sense - where else is the voice of a community more important than in our communications strategy? While I continue to work with the Communications and Marketing team on various projects, such as our website redesign, I hope to implement more of what I’ve learned from the MDP program into our approach - such as highlighting the perspectives and stories of communities, and communicating how valuable the co-op model has been to our original inhabitants of the Arctic.