Community consultations in Winnipeg revealed not a lack of desire or will to be part of the solution in increasing Indigenous youth employment opportunities, but a lack of ‘know how’ to effectively do so, particularly within the private sector. WPRC’s work has helped to bridge the gap through leveraging champions in the business community and providing connections for engagement with organizations and participants in community-based job training programs, approaching it as a relationship-based learning journey.
Working together to address Call to Action #92, the business consortium has a goal of ‘a journey toward truth and reconciliation, incorporating business-to-business learning.’ The action plan incorporates three strategies: raise awareness (about the history, the legacy and issues facing Indigenous youth), promote and support workplace education, and create new conditions for employment; the aim is to provide positive work experience within an informed, inclusive environment.
Though a number of frameworks can be useful to apply to the work, the presenters described how the Six Conditions of Systems Change resonates and that although all six conditions are important, truly transformative change can only happen when we move beyond focus on structural aspects – the policies, program and resource flows - to consider power dynamics, relationships and mental models. It is these latter components that are most powerful at ‘shifting the conditions holding a problem in place.’
Key learnings emerging from WPRC’s work:
The work in Winnipeg has shown that making the effort to adapt this model can be both worthwhile and impactful when applied to poverty reduction initiatives. An approach that casts a wider lens on systems change can better enable inclusive collective impact.
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