WEBSITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION - NEW WEBSITE COMING 2024
WEBSITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION - NEW WEBSITE COMING 2024
Signed in as:
filler@godaddy.com
We were a 2 year innovation project that generated a road map that provided suggested housing solutions for Indigenous youth aging out of care in Winnipeg.
Check out our final report as well as our ROAD MAP and let us know if you would like to get involved implementing these!
We have developed a number of resources to help with education on child welfare, as well as a network to bring in additional knowledge.
Housing Solutions for Indigenous Youth Aging Out of Care in Winnipeg is a community-based project to support the visioning and creation of housing solutions to address housing insecurity and homelessness among Indigenous youth in foster care when they age out of the child welfare system at age 18 in Winnipeg. In partnership with Aboriginal Youth Opportunities, HTFC Planning & Design, Nigaanii Wabiski Mikanak Ogichidaa, University of Manitoba’s Rady Faculty of Health Science, Shift Collaborative, and other supporters such as Fearless R2W, the one-year project is funded through the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s National Housing Strategy and supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the McConnell Foundation’s Innoweave.
Our project incorporates Indigenous knowledge and wisdom, and social innovation lab approaches, to collaboratively explore the specific needs of Indigenous youth in Winnipeg who have grown up in foster care and are at the point where institutional supports are removed. We will approach this challenge from different perspectives and worldviews, including those of people who:
Through our engagements we aim to build bridges of empathy and provide advocates, service providers, and policymakers with a more complete picture of the systems impacting Indigenous youth aging out of care. The co-creation of solutions will be scaled up among decision-makers to close service gaps and further reduce the number of Indigenous youth facing housing insecurity and homelessness once they age out of Manitoba’s child welfare system.
Relational Accountability:
We remain mutually accountable to all our relations to all kinds of life, past, present, and future. Relationship-building and strengthening supports the creation of trust, respect, and transparency to ensure relational accountability. Relationships are intended to be ongoing, genuine interactions grounded in shared interests, co-learning, empathy, humility, allyship, reciprocity, and ancestral ties. They are always approached as a ceremony, with high spiritual and moral integrity.
“Two-Eyed Seeing”:
We equally respect the contributions and co-existence of Indigenous and Western paradigms by creating an ethical space of engagement while simultaneously centering and privileging local knowledges, voices, methods, and experiences.
Indigenous Self-Determination & Sovereignty:
We ensure urban Indigenous Peoples’ inherent and treaty rights to self-determination in (i.e. autonomy and control over decisions and processes) and sovereignty (i.e. non-interference during decision-making) at all stages of engagement and collaboration. Through allyship and rotational leadership, we equitably distribute power and resources to ensure local control, shared decision-making, and reciprocal accountability. Indigenous People’s should be able to make flexible decisions to terminate or modify collaborations that overextend community time, resources, and capacity
Capacity Building & Mentorship:
We ensure enough time and resources are available for inter-generational and interdisciplinary capacity-building through mentorship, training, healing, and shared learning. We recognize, value, and compensate the expertise and labour of those offering technical and experiential knowledge based on systems literacy and lived experience.
Wholistic Systems Thinking, Knowledge Sharing & Collective Action:
We seek to capture and understand the complex factors impacting Indigenous youth homelessness and housing insecurity at various systems levels, as well as related demonstrations of local advocacy, activism, and resurgence. We recognize the interconnectedness of the Medicine Wheel and the significance of social and Indigenous determinants of health, wellness, and safety. Despite the need to understand these complex wholistic perspectives, ongoing and reciprocal knowledge exchange and translation remains pragmatic to produce relevant individual and collective actions.
Cultural Safety & Reclamation:
We create a safe space for shared learning and action that recognizes and accounts for unequal power relations, history, and Indigenous rights to avoid pan-Indigenization, perpetuation of stereotypes, and marginalization of Indigenous and local knowledges and peoples. To promote cultural safety, we further contribute to processes of reclaiming cultural identity, kinship relations, and land occupation.
Honouring & Celebrating:
We engage as humans first to distinguish the importance of laughter, humility, helping, feasting, and the role of celebration and honoring. While we identify and act on the underlying sources of disadvantage and exclusion impacting Indigenous youth aging out of care, we simultaneously honour and celebrate the strengths and welcoming nature of local communities as well as the sacred stories and gifts we all share.
Nigaanii Wabiski Mikanak Ogichidaa (NWMO)
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) -
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)
Contact to Get Involved
If you want to get involved with Housing Solutions, please email us at:
mb@fearlessr2w.ca
We use cookies to analyze website traffic and optimize your website experience. By accepting our use of cookies, your data will be aggregated with all other user data.