Birch Hill's John MacIntyre on Aboriginal Youth Development

[Music] our interest in in in aboriginal canadians particularly young aboriginal canadians goes back a few years where i along with some of my colleagues spent some time in one of the northern communities in northwest territories i subsequently have had exposure to other northern communities and while there are terrific people there it is it it really overwhelmed us with some of the large social problems that exist to the point without you know it it became an exercise to say what can a business person in toronto with business activities across this country do what can we do to change things in a positive way because the conditions that exist for many aboriginal canadians are just not acceptable it's not right in a country as rich and as and with as much prosperity as canada that we have people with no hope no income and in really terrible economic and social situations aboriginal canadians make up about four percent of the population of canada but their youth unemployment rate is twice the canadian average which is already unacceptably high we realize that as an organization one thing we can do is employ people across our companies there's about 30 000 people that we employ we're involved with many companies including banks and accounting firms and law firms and and many others that employ tens of thousands of people as well so how can we orientate orient ourselves to be more proactive in tackling that unemployment issue our larger activity has been how do we engage ourselves and our companies in our day-to-day employment activities and and employee development activities to be more focused on aboriginal canadians and we've been fortunate to be involved with an organization called princess charities canada the prince of wales in the united kingdom has almost four decades of charities that have positively moved young people from very tough circumstances into the workforce and they've done that by getting business and young people connected four percent of the population is indigenous in this country if our companies could employ four percent in in management and in entry-level positions that would be fantastic i've met companies canadian companies who set a goal of 20 percent you know that sounds like a very you know very lofty number but it you know if you put that in context over 20 percent of the population of canadian jails are aboriginal wouldn't it be great to flip that and actually have 20 of our workforce the aboriginal canadians so that's the path we're on we we think it's incredibly important and we think it's it's very achievable and we think it's achievable for us but we think it's also very achievable for other canadian businesses one of the one of the pieces of advice we have that we found great benefit from is actually having employees go through cultural training because we all at some level have a view in fact probably stereotypes of what it means to be an aboriginal canadian having some cultural training really changes that it gives non-aboriginal canadians a chance to understand where what some of the root causes of the problems are that the communities these communities face and what some of the successes have been and what actually we can think about in terms of engaging with people from from employment and even you know an uh a community perspective the second thing i would say is to really be thoughtful about how we hire people and that's people at all levels because we we tend to fall into into patterns that often exclude large components of the population and particularly our patterns could exclude aboriginal canadians being thoughtful about how we reach out to people where we find employees what employment agencies we're working through again there are many many opportunities birch hill has a a long association with queens and we've we've had a scholarship for the queen's commerce program for a number of years now and we we decided we in discussion with with the team of queens we wanted to reorient that scholarship to aboriginal students this community has seen enough disappointments and promises unfulfilled over the years that having this is as an endowed scholarship was an important thing to do it was important to give it to to give this scholarship the permanence that it it it deserves so we're really hopeful that there's going to be increased a significant increase in in the number of aboriginal students that attend queen's commerce that queens is able to find and seek out and attract and that this scholarship will go a long way into helping helping kids uh attend who otherwise couldn't afford it and then secondly i hope it would inspire others to create scholarships for this spot for the aboriginal population as well queen's commerce is a great program it develops great leaders and the aboriginal community needs great leaders [Music] you