Do what you can: Building communities in whatever way make sense

By Stephen Penner, 2nd year MDP student

The summer was spent reflecting on the question of development: respectful development, requested development. When to act, what to do, and how to do development.  It was spent struggling with the larger question of “what is the place for a non-Indigenous person to work in Indigenous communities” and the smaller challenge of appropriateness of addressing requests made by Yup’ik community members. The short answer to the broader question, is that while on placement for the program, one must act in accordance to the program and use the lessons learned in the MDP to facilitate respectful approaches and answers. 

Community general store in Alaska

My first request was to create a business plan for a Yup’ik community based commercial enterprise. I called upon my learnings from the course in Indigenous Business Planning and my group work project from the MDP Capstone course. The plan was to create an Anchorage based food distribution company as a division of the commercial enterprise.  Allowing the community to take advantage of the preferential treatment that minority owned businesses receive when bidding on contracts. I spent two days in Anchorage with the principal, meeting with potential partners and entities that were going to be critical in executing the plan.

Fish processing

The second request was to build an “un-corruptible” intra-community wellness agency to act in support of the Qunasvik initiative whose focus is suicide reduction.  The objective was to create a Yup’ik based agency that could act, support and build protective factors in the 5 communities that the Qunasvik was active. I knew the development challenge would be to understand the lived experience of the Yup’ik and translate that into the model.

Choosing a Co-op model, I created an Indigenous structure that included important cultural features to the Yup’ik that needed to written into the by-laws. Based on the Qasgig (the traditional meeting place of the Yup’ik) I outlined the reasons, rationale and starting structure of a not-for-profit (501(c)) model.  Reviewing the plans with a Co-op developer at the University of Alaska Anchorage, I received his blessing that this model as executable. I was able to complete the proposal prior to my departure.  A review of the funding structures and building an understanding of successful prevention models allowed a path to be suggested as a way to restore agency to Yup’ik communities.

 One summer, two models, one unforgettable experience and many lessons later, I am left with the ongoing question that I started with.  The only answer that I have is that when asked to deliver a project, bring the best of what you understand of the community and the best of what you can offer as a “gift” to the community. You may use such opportunities to facilitate “the good life.”