Brock’s Goodman School of Business is working to deliver professional development to local business leaders who serve indigenous youth.

Through a partnership with Niagara Peninsula Aboriginal Area Management Board (NPAAMB), training seminars offered through Goodman’s Centre for Innovation, Management and Enterprise Education (CIMEE) will be customized to fit the organization’s specific needs.

NPAAMB serves indigenous youth aged 15-30 through employment and training initiatives in southern Ontario. The organization has offices in Brantford, Fort Erie, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo and St. Catharines.

“It’s really important for us to build our capacity, especially for us as an indigenous not-for-profit organization,” NPAAMB Executive Director Shari St. Peter (BA ’98) said. “It can be very difficult to find capacity building and training dollars, so it’s very rare for us to be able to invest heavily in this area.”

St. Peter was able to secure funding through a cost share agreement with Employment Ontario under the Canada-Ontario Jobs Grant, which subsidizes the cost of training for individual employers.

“I think it’s very significant that we are able to move forward with this,” she said.

After recent growth to her staff resulted in significant management structure changes, St. Peter, a Brock alumna, turned to her alma mater for help. She knew this was a critical time to ramp up professional development and was hopeful Goodman could assist.

“We really wanted to make sure that if we are taking people within the organization and putting them in positions where they can lead, manage and support others on the team, that we provide professional development in a way that keeps everyone on the same page towards our goal and that we were using cross training to strengthen our team,” she said.

“Because we are an indigenous organization, we look at doing things in management, service delivery and team development through a different lens that’s rooted in our culture as well as our history of indigenous and First Nations people. We needed a professional development solution that is customized to our needs.”

Over the next month, St. Peter will be finalizing the programming in collaboration with CIMEE manager Abdul Rahimi to ensure the dynamics of the organization and issues faced by the staff in service delivery and not-for-profit leadership are understood.

She is also conscious of the fact that although she will be relying on the knowledge of CIMEE’s instructors, she has something to offer them in return.

“The partnership is also going to offer cross cultural competency. For it to work for us, and for it to work for Goodman, the instructors need to understand the perspective that we’re coming from and that the discussions in the class will really speak to our unique experiences as indigenous people,” she said. “The instructors can also learn from our experience and take that back into their other endeavours around leadership training.”

St. Peter called the partnership a “win-win, especially in the age of reconciliation and moving the needle on some of the calls to action under truth and reconciliation.”

Courses in the customized Non-Profit Leadership Development Certificate program will begin in September and run over seven months. They will cover topics such as change management, strategic planning and creative problem solving.