Grant boosts indigenous planner training program
An indigenous planner training program at the University of B.C. is gearing up to expand this year following a federal grant that will ensure its operation for another five years.
The Indigenous Community Planning (ICP) program at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning will use the $500,000 grant to continue offering its specialized program, believed to be the first of its kind in North America, for another five years. The one-time grant, funded by Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, has allowed for the hiring of an indigenous instructor and will up the program’s intake from six to 10 students a year, beginning this fall.
“It’s really exciting,” said program chairwoman and Prof. Leonie Sandercock. “We’re now just starting to plan for our second five years and at the same time, we’re looking ahead to the third five years and by that time, we have to be financially sustainable ourselves.”
Sandercock and Leona Sparrow, director of treaty, lands and resources with the Musqueam Indian Band, have worked closely on curriculum and other aspects of program development and delivery for six years.
ICP is offered as a masters concentration in which students attend core courses, followed by an eightmonth practicum where students are sent out in pairs to spend 400 hours living in and working with an indigenous community.
It began in 2012 thanks to funding from the Real Estate Foundation, and as a partnership between UBC and the Musqueam First Nation. Sandercock hopes more private-industry partners will step up to provide funding for the program, once they recognize the mutual economic benefit that comes from ensuring First Nations are sustainable and able to self-govern and manage their land resources.
The program allows students a chance to learn community planning and see it in action with guidance from aboriginal elders and band members.
“The old ways of trying to improve living conditions of First Nations just haven’t been working — the topdown, federal-government-imposed consultants flying in for a few days, and then flying out and then emailing a plan,” said Sandercock. “So what’s kind of radical and innovative about our program is that our approach is a lot about partnership.”
The program aims to train graduates, about 50 per cent of which are of aboriginal background, to work in a respectful way with the various treaty processes taking place across B.C., and on the comprehensive community plans being developed. Those plans will ensure First Nations are able to self-govern and protect their natural resources and way of life.
“I think it’s a breakthrough way of doing planning with indigenous communities,” said Sandercock. “I think we’re the first planning program in North America to recognize the need to think deeply about how to work in a good way with indigenous communities, given the range of issues affecting indigenous communities and their relationships with the Government of Canada.”
Sandercock cited a long history of challenges linked to housing, health care, water quality, suicide rates and the intergenerational trauma of the reserve system as being some of the reasons why a program like this is so necessary in working toward repairing those relationships.
To date, the program has produced 22 graduates who have gone on to work in significant planning or community development roles in indigenous communities across the province. Many are hired before they have graduated, as a result of the strong working relationships built during practicums.