Aboriginal Co-operatives in Canada - Centre for the Study of Co ...

~ C A S E S T U D I E SOne of the organizations that co-operated with the Economic Development TrainingProgramme was the Winnipeg Coalition on Native Child Welfare. The coalition initiatedCanada’s first major urban Native child and family support programme, known as the MaMawi Wi Chi Itata Centre. Ma Mawi now employs about fifty-five, largely Native, staff.The three projects that began in the training programme, plus the Ma Mawi Centre, are linkedtogether through a co-operative federation. This federation is incorporated without sharecapital as Winnipeg Native Family Economic Development Inc. (WNFED). The network hasalso included FCR Development Resource Group, a partnership formed to provide technicaland managerial support to WNFED projects, and to provide professional employment toAboriginal people with specialized skills relating to business and community development.In addition, from 1988 to 1991, a youth cleaning business also belonged to the WNFEDcoalition. Known as One Earth Collective, this co-operative training and employment venturewas started through Ma Mawi’s Youth Programme. In all, it provided part-time employmentand business training to forty inner-city youth. It was commercially self-sufficient for twoyears before shutting down because volunteer management assistance could no longercontinue.The model is based on action at the project level. Active participation in one of the affiliatedprojects defines membership in WNFED. WNFED has a co-ordinating board made up ofrepresentatives chosen by each of the sister projects. The idea is to facilitate the sharing ofresources at the community level through a decentralized decision-making system.From the start, it had been hoped that a community investment fund would be set up based ona voluntary pooling of capital by WNFED affiliates. However, this has not materialized todate.Obstacles and ResponsesCommunity Development InfrastructureWith all of the WNFED projects emerging within a short time of each other, resources havebeen spread very thinly and formal planning between projects is still at the preliminary stage.The different projects have been preoccupied with their own start-up and early developmentproblems. Payuk Inter-Tribal Co-op provides WNFED office space that is used by the differentprojects, but WNFED has never had any paid staff or core funding of its own.In the latter half of the 1980s, there was a special component of the federal Native EconomicDevelopment Programme (NEDP) that was supposed to have provided infrastructure support~ 367