About

OUR GOAL

Our goal is to create a community of celebrated Indigenous youth leading work that responds to the dynamic needs and priorities of their communities.

This work is done in partnership with a network of individuals, organizations and funders who all share a commitment to the values of OIYPP.

We achieve this in three ways:

Providing direct financial, mentorship and capacity support to indigenous youth to explore and execute their own ideas;
Building reciprocal relationships between Indigenous youth and a community of support including individuals, organizations and funders.
Increasing awareness amongst the sector of philanthropy’s on-going role in colonization and in response pushing for change according to our learnings and values

The partnership is deeply rooted in reciprocity and shared ownership focusing on mutual learning experiences to build strong, equal and lasting relationships between everyone involved

OUR VALUES

Our values are ever evolving and come from a place of discussion and unity. Every year our Youth Advisory Committee, comprised of Indigenous youth from across Ontario, and a core team from The Circle and MakeWay meet in-person for a day of visualization and relationship building. This is known as the Annual Kick-Off Meeting. This collaborative process molds OIYPP’ activities and allows us to reflect upon and update our values as we grow and new perspectives join the OIYPP team.

It is important to note that the values are intentionally presented in no particular order to hold all OIYPP participants equally accountable.

Indigenize:
This is the act of us decoupling from Western approaches and focusing on a process of relearning that encompasses the diversity of Indigenous peoples. By acknowledging our original responsibilities to the land, we aim to restore Indigenous knowledge, cultural values, languages, and teachings in our work. We oppose the use of “Indigenize” as an attempt to present all Indigenous peoples and their values or practices as ‘the same’ (or pan-Indigenous). We acknowledge and are proud of the diversity of our communities.
For a brief introduction about the diversity of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, we recommend reading page 16-18 of the Roadmap:
https://fncaringsociety.com/publications/roadmap-truth-and-reconciliation-commissions-call-action-66

Accessible:
We want to ensure that the process of applying for a grant or working with OYIPP is as barrier-free as possible for Indigenous youth. We encourage youth to reach out if there are challenges to your application that would prevent you from seeing your idea come to life. We aim to be as accessible as possible in many different ways such as providing an ASL translator, child care so you can attend our gathering, Inuktitut translator, using gender-inclusive language, and ensuring gender-neutral washrooms. We are working on ensuring our website is more accessible and easier to navigate, considering colours and textures and readability. Each year we are doing our best to find news ways of supporting grantees so they can fully participate in OIYPP activities, such as procuring proper devices (laptops or tablets) to connect.

Relationships:
Respect, honesty, courage, wisdom, truth, humility and love (Anishinaabe Seven Grandfather Teachings) guide us in building unity among our relationships with our Indigenous Youth Leading Projects, our Indigenous Youth Advisors, the Core Team and our partners in philanthropy. Consent and trust are values that define our relationships in addition to the Seven Grandfather Teachings. We trust the youth we serve to have the knowledge and skills to do their work, and they trust that we will do everything we can to support in the case they need to build skills to confidently do their work. Consent is a critical part of trust in that we do our best to be transparent and direct with the processes we are going to undertake together so everyone is as informed as possible and feels comfortable to decline participation.

Healing:
OIYPP works to support healing within the communities of Indigenous youth and the philanthropic sector. Therefore healing reflects two approaches for us:

healing the history of philanthropy, how it has impacted and often participated in dispossession and colonization of Indigenous peoples.
youth know what is needed and have the ability to heal themselves and their communities.

Responsibility:
Embracing responsibility as a value means that we are accountable to the youth that we work with. We believe in the importance of building mutual trust and do our best to ensure that we are transparent and responsive to the needs of Indigenous young people and their communities. We are also guided by our responsibility to protect youth from ongoing harms that exist in the sector (e.g. racism, tokenism, extraction of knowledge and labour etc.). We recognize that Indigenous youth are resilient and carry their own tools to navigate these spaces. However, the OIYPP team is in a position to help them strengthen these tools and to shield some of this harm.

Reciprocity:
We believe that the work with Indigenous youth through OIYPP is a fair exchange. We feel that our communities gave us many things - a sense of belonging, cultural teachings, and space to learn about ourselves and grow. So we feel it is our responsibility to give back. To us, reciprocity means “giving, receiving and sharing” and we believe that we have just as much to gain from a partnership with youth, as they do with us. We try to continue to foster our relationships with the grantees even after their granting year. Reciprocity is not transactional.

Leadership:
We believe a leader is brave and takes chances outside of their comfort zone. We are inspired by the initiative taken by our youth that apply for grants every year, and also want to convey that anyone can be a leader. We see leaders as speaking up when something is wrong and they motivate others to take action. They are accountable to their supporters. They are willing to welcome change and most importantly, they encourage interdependence (being independent but being open to having others share). Leaders have that Skoden attitude!

Decolonize:
Over time, settler colonialism has perpetuated racial violence, forced assimilation, language loss, and land apprehension against Indigenous peoples. Settler colonialism was not a historical event, but is on-going and we are critical of how the structures in place today uphold settler colonial ideals. In this recognition, and during a time of reconciliation, we aim to approach our work through the framework of decolonization. OIYPP views the decolonization process as a chance to disassemble colonial structures and reimagine a society that prioritizes Indigenous knowledge and traditions. We want to allow Indigenous youth to create projects they identify with and are passionate about. Therefore, using decolonization as a guiding framework, we will create space for projects that are not bound by euro-centric requirements.

Adaptability:
First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples and communities are capable of incredible resilience, resourcefulness and adaptability. With the arrival of COVID-19, it became very clear that OIYPP needed to hold strong to its main mission of getting granting funds into the hands of youth. The projects that OIYPP supports are critical to community and mental wellbeing and, more often than not, are life saving. It has been nothing but reassuring that even during a global pandemic youth know what they need, can adapt quickly and they never stop trying to better themselves and their communities.

2022 Additions

Harm Reduction:
“Harm Reduction As a Way of Life: Means that we, as well as our ancestors, have been keeping our communities safe and reducing harms long before the word “harm reduction” came into the English language. It’s about reducing the many harms in our lives, not limited to just substance use (ie. colonialism, racism, homophobia/transphobia, criminalization, etc) through the tools that work best for us, without stigma or judgment. We also don’t define what harm is for other people.” https://www.nativeyouthsexualhealth.com/what-we-believe-in
OIYPP Youth Advisors wanted to put special emphasis on harm reduction and prioritizing safety. Collectively we have a deep understanding of the lived experiences of Indigenous youth through colonization and capitalism and how they create barriers for youth in participating in programs the same way as settler Canadians.
We put this into action by ensuring the process of applying, “reporting”, language and our values represent our changing landscapes, current issues in community and is reflective of experience and prioritizes safety.
We also see balance as an aspect of harm reduction using the Sweetgrass braid teachings/medicine wheel teaching

Intersectionality

We aim to be intentionally inclusive of Indigenous youth and all of their intersecting identities. We acknowledge that power operates against Indigenous youth and perpetuates harm in multifaceted ways. Through adopting the lens of intersectionality in our work we are collectively standing together to promote safety, and be conscientious of how social identity structures (e.g. race, class, gender, ableism, etc) foster our life experiences. We want to be intentionally inclusive of the array of identities (and intersections) of our young people, and actively avoid tokenism. We recognize that our communities can perpetuate harm against each other (e.g. Indigenous communities being homophobic, or exclusionary of Black-Indigenous folks, and perpetuating anti-Blackness), and commit to doing our best to redress these harms. We want to meet Indigenous youth where they are at, and embrace all aspects of their being (e.g. urban, on-reserve, 2SLGBTQ+, Afro-Indigenous, Black Natives, etc)