Stanley Mission, Saskatchewan

A series of workshops were conducted under the leadership of Sheena Sinclair over spring, summer and fall seasons (all of this accompanied by delicious meals cooked by Sheena and her team!).

“Preparing our Home” is a community-based program that enables Indigenous youth to reach their potential in becoming resilience leaders in their communities. The program strengthens resilience capabilities in Indigenous communities by building leadership through youth training and exercises.

This toolkit outlines key elements of the program as it was implemented in Stanley Mission Band, Saskatchewan: hazard mapping and community asset mapping, First Aid basics, youth-led fire safety, youth preparedness training and strategies (personal/household and community levels), and traditional food preservation practices (fish preparation).

The Preparing Our Home program shows the youth that their ideas are valuable and that it is also their job to protect and help manage their lands. It is very powerful to watch a room full of young minds work to solve problems that no one had ever asked them about before. The youth also learned from each other by sharing their experiences of emergencies that had happened in their communities.

The Preparing Our Home program gave us a bigger platform to help forward emergency management best practices in our communities. It is in a lot of cases what the youth needed to help create real change at home. To have someone believe in their ideas and to have a contact with the knowledge to back up their dreams can go a very long way.

I hold the Preparing Our Home program in very high regard as collectively it is creating real change in our First Nation Communities across Canada by giving our youth the power to use their voices about real issues.

Michelle Vandevord/Manager – Saskatchewan First Nations Emergency Management.

Click on the image to download the PREPARING OUR HOME: Stanley Mission, Saskatchewan Storybook.