I see this every day. It's enormously frustrating for me to work with communities and not to be able to fully effect change. What I see as an evolving best practice is doing inreach into communities, meaning not taking people out of their communities but actually going into the communities and working with them to identify opportunities, local relevant opportunities.
In many first nations, you see that there is resource development activity happening around the community, but often the community is not participating in that resource development activity. I also see a need to bring in industry. Industry and the community need to come together and understand what business opportunities are there for them to procure services and to build businesses that focus on business-to-business opportunities.
I also see the opportunity to get youth involved at a very early age in entrepreneurship in the communities.
I think that part of the puzzle is going into the communities and not coming in with pre-existing programming but working with the communities to develop the curriculum.
Also, ongoing coaching and mentorship are absolutely essential and not for the typical six months or one year. I think it needs to be of longer duration to actually effect change.