I will just start with a little bit on who we are.
I'm one of the founders of Raven Indigenous Capital Partners—private capital, venture capital, two or three funds, and investing in businesses. What I discovered in that process is that we weren't really addressing community need. It's a good model. It does certain things, and certain economic activity comes out of it. However, we were getting calls, particularly from communities saying that they had problems to address and that the capital was not showing up in the right way. That means that it's either government programs or grants, which is usually limited, puts you in a box, and doesn't really do the thing that you need it to do; or private capital, which is pretty extractive, especially on natural resource projects. You need a different way of approaching it.
What Raven Outcomes does is collect.... We pool private capital and some philanthropic, as well, if we need to do pre-development work. However, we go into the community; we build a relationship. Frankly, it's all about the relationship at the end of the day. In building the relationship, we hear about what the community's priorities are and what its needs are. We bring disparate actors together. We often have an indigenous solutions lab where we can problem-solve it. You also get to know what the community's assets and strengths are and where the real capacities need to be built. You're not guessing from the outside looking in; the community is telling you. Then, when you understand what their priorities are, you can understand how to construct projects around those, projects that, at the end of the day, you actually want them to lead. When a community owns a project, has the ownership of it—the deep, personal ownership of it—the successful execution is nearly guaranteed. When you run across problems, like once-in-a-century floods, which happened to us in one of our.... We were doing geothermal, on-reserve residential housing. It happened. We were able to adjust with them, to actually help them, because we had existing stock and supplies that we had purchased and put aside to put into other homes. We could be helpful. It was a relationship, and it was deep engagement.
My comment, in the context of Bill C-5, is that major national projects are great, but relationships start today, frankly. You need to build them from the ground up, like the chief indicated. You need to have deep conversations and actually build the path, the road map, where you then have multi-billion dollar projects that can be executed with local willing partners, and they actually help you adjust projects. Project planners are great, and engineers are great, but when you get into the reality of being inside the community, you might need to adjust how these things are executed. Our model is predicated on relationship first, money second.