Imagine having accurate and up-to-date information about your community readily available for staff and leadership to help prepare funding applications and to be in control of the information shared about your community with governments and industry who wish to operate in your territory.
Proactively gathering current community environmental, economic, social, cultural, and health conditions information can better prepare communities to participate in impact assessments for mining, energy, infrastructure, and other development projects proposed in the territory. These ‘baseline’ studies may also streamline access to information needed for community program funding applications.
Currently, funding is available for Indigenous groups to support baseline studies in advance of large-scale industrial projects with the potential to contaminate land, water, or air, and impact human health. Applications are due September 29, 2023.
Odonaterra staff have many decades of experience working with Indigenous communities to prepare community social and wellbeing baseline studies for impact assessments. Through this experience, it has become clear that this work will benefit communities and be effective for controlling what information is shared about the community in impact assessments, if community information is gathered about the things that matter the most to communities, with the full involvement of community representatives in research design and implementation. This approach is enshrined in First Nation data sovereignty OCAP® principles and is one of the key service areas Odonaterra was created to do.
Being proactive and gathering relevant data before governments and industry projects are proposed is also important and allows the necessary time for communities to be full participants without the pressures of impact assessment timelines.
Recently, Odonaterra has worked with Wemindji First Nation and their business development company, Waptum to prepare a Cree-led social and Indigenous rights baseline and impact assessment related to Newmont’s Éléonore Project in northwestern Quebec. We also gathered social, economic, and cultural baseline date for the Inuit community of Sanikiluaq that supported the impact assessment process for the first wind project in Nunavut. Check out our webpage for testimonials about our work.
If your community would like to be proactive and maintain control over your community health and environmental information used in impact assessments, please consider working with us and applying for the First Nations Baseline Assessment Program on Health and the Environment.
To meet funding requirements, Odonaterra is pleased to partner with Mary-Claire Buell, PhD an environmental toxicologist who has worked with a number of Indigenous Nations on projects that relate to environmental and community health.
Connect with us to discuss how we can help and see our Annual selected funding list for other opportunities to fund your future projects!