Aboriginal Leadership launches new applied research projects
By Brian Calliou
The Banff Centre’s Aboriginal Leadership and Management division is leading an important new applied research initiative on best practices in Aboriginal community and business leadership.
The first initiative for Aboriginal Leadership and Management comes with Nexen’s generous donation of $1 million to establish the Nexen Chair in Aboriginal Leadership. Dr. Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux of the University of Toronto is the first Nexen Chair, a trained researcher with extensive experience in community work. The Nexen Chair led a best practices literature review and co-authored a report on these findings that form the basis of a Banff Centre “wise practices” approach to this research.
The Nexen Chair also plays a lead role in the research and documentation of case studies that tell specific stories about how initiatives moved from a dream to completion. These success stories can then be translated and applied in other Aboriginal communities that choose to undertake similar initiatives.
The investment by Nexen was leveraged to acquire an additional $1.3 million from the Rural Alberta Development Fund to begin the best practices research by focusing on four Alberta Aboriginal case studies. A youth cohort and a test case community will benefit from the research by being involved from the outset to learn about these success stories and the elements that have contributed to their success. The four rural case study communities will also be on a learning journey of reflection and review, and will learn how to narrate their own story. In other words, they play an active role in the research and in narrating their story. The documented case studies, knowledge, and success stories will also be shared in a variety of media – text, photography, video, and on-line so that other rural Alberta Aboriginal leaders can learn from them.
The second new Aboriginal Leadership and Management research initiative, Building Sustainable Leadership for Community Development, is supported with a $1-million donation by Suncor which will help fund a pilot research project working directly with four First Nations communities. The approach involves action learning and problem-based learning, which means the community chooses a team of people who will play an active role in identifying and analyzing problems, co-designing action plans, assembling internal teams to put the plans into action, and measuring results. Community participants will document their learning journeys, through the action learning cycle of plan, act, reflect, and learn, and act again with improvements. The knowledge they acquire in this solution-based learning journey will provide the community teams with skills they can use to tackle other community challenges.
These are exciting projects that will provide a learning journey for the communities involved in the research projects, and will also provide new knowledge to underpin our programming content, thereby further assisting Aboriginal leaders in their professional development.
Brian Calliou is director of Aboriginal Leadership and Management Development at The Banff Centre.
