"Moving the Dial" on: Building Indigenous Community Relationships

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.

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