The Urban Aboriginal Strategy: Community Consultations

Abstract

The Urban Aboriginal Strategy (UAS) has three broad national priorities that touch on life skills; promoting jobs, training, and entrepreneurship; and providing support for women, children and families. This report explored these priorities within Winnipeg’s Aboriginal community in order to obtain feedback and advice so as to allow the UAS in Winnipeg to direct initiatives that reflected a local response to these national priorities over a five year program window.This report also reviewed the literature and determined that there was a strong relationship with what has been said in reports with what Winnipeg’s Aboriginal community expressed during the consultative process. This included providing support for women, targeting youth, assisting seniors and also considering the needs of Aboriginal males. The role of mobility both within the city and between the city and rural and northern areas was also highlighted as remaining an area of critical concern.In the end, what emerged was not a set of priorities but more so this work shed light on a set of guiding principles and considerations for future efforts to consider and embrace and perhaps “…build capacity in our urban Aboriginal community.”