Perfect. Thanks so much.
Welcome everyone. Pidamaya.
Thank you for giving me time to speak on behalf of FHQ Developments, which represents the File Hills Tribal Council within the Treaty 4 territory in Saskatchewan. I am a member of Muscowpetung First Nation.
When we look at some of the barriers to economic participation for indigenous communities, we have to go back to having a look at the economic and socio-economic impacts that we need to demand for some of the projects that happen within our territories, and how we manage business and create those business relationships within our territories.
I look at quite a number of projects that are federally or provincially funded, projects that happen within the territory. Let's go back and try to assess what is accountability and transparency on these projects for indigenous participation. We're told that there are indigenous procurement policies in place and that they're going to spend so many dollars with indigenous companies and employ so many indigenous people, but the experience that I've had in my five years as CEO is that a lot of times policy dictates sometimes negative relationships, where organizations are willing to do just enough in order to secure a contract or to meet the premise of indigenous procurement policies. On the labour side of the coin, we see major projects where it's just enough to get an indigenous person a job for a period of time for a project, versus actually building and developing capacity for our own people.
These are things that are often very frustrating for us when we see these major projects in our territories. They continue to move forward and to talk about the success, but that success is only transactional in nature and only at one point in time, rather than being built on a relationship between those businesses, those projects and the first nations in those territories.
Those are some aspects that I know we've seen in a lot of projects. Based on the types of policies that we see within our territory, I know that we've had to change the way we do business as an organization. Our focus is absolutely on economic and socio-economic impacts. That means that we not only need to build a business portfolio that is competitive and can compete in the markets with non-indigenous businesses, we also have the responsibility of economic development and making sure that we're building the indigenous business ecosystem around us. How do we bring our nations, how do we bring our entrepreneurs and our citizens together with us in economic prosperity with these projects?
The third piece to this is how we actually develop indigenous talent alongside the opportunities, so we have a very specific strategy that focuses on indigenous participation. That means that we are taking the time to understand the work and the careers that are to be built. We're not here to just fill numbers for organizations. We are here to actually build careers, so our team of indigenous HR specialists works with organizations to develop more thorough plans on how we're going to see the opportunity, see the careers, so that our young people....
If we work with an organization, and let's say 10 years out they're going to need a certain type of engineer or a certain type of skill set, we want to begin doing the career coaching and mentorship that is necessary with organizations to build relationships between those organizations and our nations, and between our businesses and those individuals, so that when our youth are looking at opportunity for the future, at least they know we're there supporting them and trying to find opportunity that isn't just another training program for the sake of training; we're actually training them for career opportunities.
That's a really important aspect of the way we've been able to navigate strategy.
When we look at the history of our organization, we're considered to be a bit young. We're in our infancy as an organization. We've only been around for a little over 10 years, but we started with very low investment from our nations. We've leveraged relationships and strategy, and we've used what government programs we've been able to access to be able to build and develop the business model we now have as an organization.
We've also taken a very serious step in working with our partners in the businesses we create, so that we are actually building capacity, so that we do have an equity stake and so that these aren't just joint ventures or business relationships that are based on contracts; these are actual businesses we are building.
We're focusing on—