Learning By Doing, Asking and Listening

By Stella Rakwach, 1st year MDP Student

Problem tree (causes & effects of financial exclusion) - focus groups results at Ma Mawi

Research is a very important aspect of community development, often providing solutions to challenges affecting them. Such solutions should be context specific, informed by local cultures and world views to improve their acceptance in such communities. One size fits all policies/solutions may not be applicable in addressing modern day development issues. What is considered a problem in one community may not be an issue in another. This is very evident when comparing financial exclusion in different communities for example Canada has three major financial sectors: mainstream financial institutions (MFIs), fringe financial institutions (FFI) & informal borrowing/lending. I was comparing that to my country Kenya which on the contrary only has the MFIs & informal borrowing/ lending. FFIs maybe a problem in Canada but is almost non-existent in Kenya. Hence in terms of financial systems in Canada there could be a middle ground while in Kenya you are either in or out of the system. Recently our team has been working on indigenous financial exclusion (IFE) & literacy research data collection. Finding participants for the research methods has not been very easy but it has worked out well courtesy of partnerships with SEED Winnipeg, Ma Mawi & Fisher River Cree Nation (FRCN). By taking part in various activities at the sites I met new friends who introduced me to potential participants and later made use of the snowball effect to get more.

Money Management Class at SEED Winnipeg

We attended a money management class and had a small exercise dubbed ‘money & me’ which involved writing on a piece of paper about what one would like spend money on. Then we walked around the room as we asked each other questions and it was interesting to find out that people were saving for items like mattresses, glasses, couches, children’s education and cars etc.  SEED is doing a great job through its savings program which helps their participants save to meet their financial objectives and in addition to that an initiative to help parents set up RESP accounts to save towards their children’s education. In one activity, the class was divided into groups and tasked with identifying the challenges facing their community and suggest possible solutions to these challenges. Part of this activity included separating individual and communal solutions to the communities’ problems. I presented for my group and I had a wonderful time sharing especially on the one person solutions as that would be a development practitioner’s main job. So I talked about charity, volunteering, scholarships/sponsorships, voting, keeping rules, reporting crime as these would be key in promoting education, and good leadership and hence better laws and promote security and other areas of community development.

Cooking Class at Ma Mawi (McGregor site)

 

Lunch is ready! Stella (L) & Grenda (staff member at Ma Mawi)

The cooking began with a short orientation from the lady in charge of the kitchen, I washed my hands and she handed me a pair of gloves and something to cover my hair which I put on then she showed me around the kitchen cabinets to know where to get the cutlery, plates, cups etc. On the menu today is split peas soup & salad and bread.  I helped by dicing some onions and bacon then she put all the ingredients together into a large pot to get the soup boiling. Then we made some caesar salad together as we talked about mainstream banks and fringe banks (pawnshops & payday lenders) and by 12 noon lunch was ready and I put on my name tag and served lunch to the community at the kitchen counter. Later I walked around the dining area with a tray serving fritas for dessert. All that’s well ends well; the staff were very grateful and offered to introduce me to a few people who were interested in participating in the IFE research.

Finding Fisher River

At the beginning of the third week of July, we travelled to Fisher River Cree Nation, as we had completed data collection for the IFE study in Winnipeg. The journey began around 8:30 am after getting directions on Google maps hoping to get there before 11am. All was well till we reached a dead end at a quarry/ construction site, and we had to drive back to the main highway and get new directions from there. We later found our way and arrived safely. We had a wonderful reception courtesy of the band office, the people were nice and respectful. The place was quiet and full of fresh air and it felt so peaceful and refreshing away with no TV and the hustle and bustle of daily life in Winnipeg. In the afternoon of the same day and following days we visited the band office, community store and the Charles Sinclair High school and met a few participants interested in taking part in the resident survey, financial life histories or the focus groups. Therefore for community research & or development to be successful, one must be willing to take part in community activities, exchange knowledge and earn the people’s trust hence learning by doing, asking & listening.

Enjoying some fresh air in Fisher River after a successful day collecting data

Fisher River and Financial Exclusion Research

By Gabrielle Héroux, 1^st year MDP student

Day 4 of the trip to Fisher River, the other site for our research project on Indigenous Financial Exclusion.  It’s the last official week of my field placement.  It’s been a good week.  Got off to a fairly inauspicious start, though, when Stella, her family, and I got completely lost in the backroads of rural Manitoba.  How’s that for a terrible way to die.  Word to the wise: if you’re going to Fisher River, do not rely on Google Maps for directions.  Anyways, got back on the right path with the help of a kind stranger in a minivan.  Got here midday-ish on Monday, headed straight to the band office to meet up with Dion McKay, the band councilor who’s been our main contact in FRCN.  We hashed out the finer details of our stay here, discussed accommodations, work space, and our student assistant.  For the latter, we were set up with Taylor, a young woman who is about to start her third year at the University of Winnipeg, and is participating in FRCN’s youth summer employment program.

And not to put too fine a point on it, or anything, but she has been amazing.  There’s no way we could have accomplished even half as much as we have without her.  She’s organized, she’s motivated, she’s been calling everyone she knows and recruiting people like gangbusters.

Recruitment, predictably, has been the most difficult part of the week.  There are the obstacles of not knowing many people here, of our very short time frame, and of there not really being one central place to find a bunch of people at once.  But it’s also a busy week for the community, for good and not-so-good reasons.  For one, they’re having Treaty Days next week, and lots of people are involved with that, preparing food stands and organizing events.

Dion also let us know that the band office’s long-time receptionist passed away on the Saturday before we got here.  So, naturally, a lot of focus and energy is on that.  It’s been weighing heavily on everyone’s hearts and minds.  Her funeral is today in Fairford, where she was born.  So the band office is closed, and a good number of community members are out there.

The only ATM in Fisher River Cree Nation. 

We have nevertheless gotten a good deal of research done.  As in Winnipeg, people have been very interested in our topic, and eager to share their experiences.  Some notable trends have emerged so far, different from some of what we saw in the city.  For instance, I don’t think I’ve surveyed anyone yet who has used a payday lender or pawnshop, and if they’ve used fringe financial institutions at all, it’s been the local store.  Which makes sense – people use what’s available and convenient.  People are also highly mobile here, traveling back and forth to Winnipeg and other nearby communities, doing their banking at banks or credit unions there.  Some respondents have expressed the wish to have a bank here, but it doesn’t seem to be a gigantic obstacle.  The community has adapted.

Diane Roussin, of Ma Mawi, made an interesting point at an Advisory Committee meeting earlier in the summer.  She said that people’s dreams and expectations around banking are shaped by their experiences.  They may not want more than what has been available to them, not because their current situation is the most advantageous, simply because we know what we know.  It can be difficult to want to something that’s essentially always been outside your reality.  How do you know your Access to Basic Banking Services (ABBS) rights aren’t being adequately upheld, if you don’t know you have those rights?  Which is not inconceivable.  Many people don’t know about ABBS.  For that matter, I’ve worked with tellers who don’t know about ABBS.

Anyways, it’s an important point that makes a lot of sense, and might mean something as yet undetermined for our results.  Not sure what kind of impact that will have on our Ideal Bank participatory method, or on people’s responses to the survey questions about how satisfied they are and what, if anything, they would change about their financial services.  That’s a difficult thing to control for.

But we’ll forge ahead anyways.  I have one day left in FRCN, and I’m hoping to get some financial life histories and a focus group done tomorrow.  Then it’s back to Winnipeg, and then back home.  I can hardly believe this placement is almost done.  That’ll take some processing time.  I know this project isn’t done, not even close.  So the summer may be coming to an end.  But we still have work to do!

Research and the Three Rs

By Gabrielle Héroux, 1^st year MDP student

It’s been almost two months since the official start of my field placement.  But the truth is, the lessons started even earlier – patience, open-mindedness, the ability to roll with the punches and adapt.  My first two field placement choices fell through.  So it goes, and so here we are.

And here I am, sitting at a bus stop across from Winnipeg Square waiting to meet up with Stella.  It’s raining.  Again.  We made this plan to touch base briefly here, she en route to Ma Mawi for the afternoon, I en route to campus.  We have materials and information to exchange.

We’ve been working with Dr. Jerry Buckland as research assistants on a project concerning financial exclusion, defined as the failure of the mainstream banking system to provide credit and depository services at competitive prices to all individuals, households, and businesses.  As a subset of broader social exclusion, it usually affects lower income people and communities.  In this project, we want to know how it affects indigenous people, both in Winnipeg and in Fisher River Cree Nation.  Here in the city, we’ve been working in partnership with SEED Winnipeg and Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata (Ma Mawi for short).  Our plan is to develop recruitment strategies with them to find participants for the various methods we intend to use (a quantitative survey, financial life histories, and two focus group-type activities).  We’re still in the initial phases of establishing these relationships.  So far, most of the work we’ve done has been from home, or from the University, drafting our literature review and mapping out protocols.

Stella Rakwach (L) & Gabrielle Héroux (R)

The two of us spent a few hours at Ma Mawi last week.  We had a meeting with Garry Richard, the manager of their McGregor location.  It’s a fantastic site, a bright and airy building that also houses a daycare, a youth YMCA complete with indoor skatepark and climbing wall, and a quick-care clinic on the second floor.  Ma Mawi itself offers different programs and classes – for youth, for seniors, for women, for parents – but most people just drop in.  They come to have coffee or something to eat, to use the computers or laundry facilities, to sit and chat with their friends.  It’s always busy.  They are clearly a crucial part of the community.

Everyone, no matter their reason for being there, has to sign in.  So Garry told us that one thing we could do would be to sit at their greeter desk, signing people in, and also handing out flyers about our project to stir up some interest.  This seemed like a good idea, so we went with it.

After an hour or so, an elderly man, non-Aboriginal, came up and read our flyer.  And he had lots to say on the topic of indigenous financial exclusion.  He called another man over, an older Anishinaabe man we had seen around and briefly spoken to.  “Did you read this?” he asked.  “The university girls want to help you Aboriginals.”

Oh no, I thought.  That won’t go over well.  Sure enough…  “You want to help us?” he asked.  “Then do us a favour and go back to where you came from.  Give us back our land.”  With that, he tore up the flyer and walked away.

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that whole exchange.  For one, I felt it was neither the time nor the place to hash it out.  But it made me think about what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and how best to do it.

It’s been clear to me, from the start, that I’m not out to “help the Aboriginals”, as though I’m some sort of crucial part of the equation without which they’ll never get anything done, as though I alone have something to offer that they, in their deprivation, need.  That isn’t what this is about.  I’m doing anyone any favours.

So what am I doing, then?  Jerry told Stella and me in one of our meetings that, in order to be a good development practitioner, you have to have a good sense of who you are.  Otherwise, you’ll be running around, haphazardly, trying to convert everyone to your way of thinking.  Being told to go back to where I came from really gave me pause.  Where is that, anyways?  Am I from France, because that’s where my Héroux ancestor came from in the 1670s?  Am I from Pinaymootang, because that’s where my Cree ancestors were from, where my mother is registered?  I’ve never been to either of those places.  What does this all mean?  And how much of your identity has to do with who claims you, as opposed to who you claim to be?

I’ve also been thinking about what Darren Courchene told us during our field placement orientation, about the elder who didn’t answer the researcher’s questions, because that wasn’t the lesson she wanted to teach him that day.  I’ve been thinking a lot about how that story illustrates the three Rs.  Respect.  Relationship.  Reciprocity.  As our research unfolds, as we begin to collect our data and generate results, we’ll all have to think very carefully about the practical application of these principles.  I know I’m bringing some biases into this project, naturally, having always been banked, having worked in a bank for years, having grown up the way I did.  So how can the three Rs temper the assumptions with which I’m starting out, and really make this work meaningful?