Moving the Dial On: Building Indigenous Community Relationships

Community-Based Research Canada presents “Moving the Dial”: the 2023 E-Learning series. This series will highlight action-oriented community-based research that is ‘moving the dial’ on today’s pressing societal challenges. An important hallmark of community-based research, taking an action-orientated and impactful approach, means research partnerships mobilizing knowledge and mobilizing communities towards positive societal change. The research projects highlighted within this series demonstrate impact of community-based research. You will hear about research partnerships that facilitated actions improving societal conditions, including changes in policies, systems, organizations, and communities where everyone is supported and belongs.

In 2020, Niginan Housing Ventures (NHV), a registered non-profit charity formed to address housing needs and requirements of Indigenous people living in Edmonton, started a housing initiative named Omamoo Wango Gamik. This is a pilot program where youth formerly in foster care are housed in a multi-generational housing facility that provides wraparound supports along with access to Elders and other cultural supports. The pilot created a community-based research opportunity to follow the experiences of youth entering an Indigenous-led housing initiative. Residents from this housing pilot were invited to participate in a research project funded by the Making the Shift Youth Homelessness Social Innovation Lab. What started as a research project with the intent to understand how an Indigenous-led program can help prevent Indigenous youth houselessness has grown into a more significant collaboration between researchers and community partners. This presentation will describe how using Indigenous Ways of Knowing has fostered a reciprocal relationship between the researchers and community partners and how this collaboration has led to changing the research to best suit the needs of the community partner.