Good afternoon.
Thank you for this opportunity to appear at this meeting of the committee.
As the chair said, I am Bill Shead. I'm an 85-year-old Cree member of the Peguis First Nation, a navy veteran and currently chair of the Neeginan Centre, where indigenous people are helped in their transition to urban life.
This is a rather unique approach that I'm going to be talking about. It doesn't deal directly with services to veterans, but I think it's a model that perhaps those who are involved in delivering services to veterans, indigenous and non-indigenous, might learn from.
As migration of indigenous people into urban centres increased, governments rolled out programs and funding to NGOs—that's non-governmental organizations or charities, not-for-profits—to help indigenous people adjust to urban life, and most programs addressed transition issues in an ad hoc silo fashion. NGOs operated independently from one another, yet on associated issues affecting transition, different government agencies would fund different NGOs to operate programs for each issue, such as literacy, training, etc.
Complicating matters further, funding for rental space for program delivery was often inadequate. NGOs were limited to renting space as is, where is, and the spaces were unrenovated, not suitable for service and in difficult to access sites.
Working together, several NGOs in Winnipeg resolved to improve workspace and service delivery shortcomings. They incorporated as the Aboriginal Centre of Winnipeg, and in 1990.... I'm sorry; that's when they incorporated. In 1992, they purchased Winnipeg's historic CP railroad station.
I have been associated with the Neeginan Centre since the beginning of 1993, initially as CEO responsible for the restoration and renovation of the station into a one-stop service centre. On completion, the 120-year-old building emerged as an operational service centre that the people who first incorporated as the Aboriginal Centre of Winnipeg envisioned.
At the Neeginan Centre, indigenous people receive a variety of education, training and support services to help them improve their life opportunities. Two major NGOs operate out of the centre. I'll talk about each of them.
Neeginan Education, Training and Employment Services provides education, training, student support services and employment opportunities. It operates the Aboriginal Community Campus; Neeginan College of Applied Technology; Kookum's Place Daycare; Neeginan Village, a student housing complex; and the aboriginal aerospace initiative and technical training centre.
The Aboriginal Health & Wellness Centre is a community-based health and wellness resource agency. Programs and services offered include a primary care clinic, community outreach and education, and health promotion and prevention with the services of physicians, nurses, community health workers and traditional healers. Abinotci Mino-Ayawin is a children's health head start program. They also operate a fetal alcohol syndrome and effects prevention program.
In the late 1990s, aboriginal veterans argued for more public recognition. This led to the mayor of the City of Winnipeg declaring Aboriginal Veterans Day for the city in 1993. In 1994, the Neeginan Centre staff and students put on the first Aboriginal Veterans Day service in the rotunda of the Neeginan Centre. That service has continued ever since, with the exception of the COVID years.
There is one other program I wanted to speak very briefly about. I'm a member of the board of directors of Indspire. Indspire is a charity that raises money for post-secondary education for indigenous students.
This program started when the former name for Indspire was the Canadian Native Arts Foundation. It took responsibility for the stewardship of the national aboriginal veterans scholarships fund, initiated by the Government of Canada on a recommendation of the Senate committee on indigenous veterans, chaired by the late Senator Len Marchand.
The $1.1-million fund has stimulated fantastic growth in the work of Indspire. It is now funding, through scholarships and bursaries, indigenous students pursuing careers in post-secondary education and training. Since 1996, Indspire has distributed $270 million in scholarships and bursaries to some 74,000 students. This year alone we will have distributed $32 million to 8,400 students. These two organizations, Indspire and Neeginan, were really the initiative of indigenous leaders who took a very great chance.
Neeginan purchased a 120,000-square-foot building with an idea of turning it into a better place to deliver services in a coordinated fashion. It succeeded.
Indspire, stimulated by the requirement to have responsibility for a fund that had to be used to deliver scholarships and bursaries beyond its initial scope of arts, now has succeeded in what I think is beyond its wildest dreams, delivering so many scholarships to so many students in the past 20-some years.
My association with two of these organizations is indicative of the veterans who have been involved in the work of all of these efforts to improve life for indigenous people generally returning to the city. The fact that the Neeginan Centre alone has successfully proven that you can be successful delivering services in a coordinated one-stop service centre perhaps is something that the Department of Veterans Affairs could look at, as well as others who want to help veterans who are returning to life in home communities.