Page 101 - Six Nations Community Plan 2019

GOING FORWARD:

A FUTURE OF COMMUNITY PLANNING

FUNDING OUR FUTURE
The Community Plan is visionary and ambitious—to reach our
vision will require financial resources. However, our path to self-
determination must involve greater economic self-reliance so
that we can determine our own economic strategies to support
long term community development. To do this, we need to
imagine where we want to go in the future so that we can begin
to understand the resources required. This Community Plan is
one step in that direction of laying out our shared ambitions.

Presently there are several funding sources that are working
to provide resources towards community needs and goals
highlighted in the Community Plan including local trust money,
government funding, development partnerships and grants.
Unfortunately, these funding streams can often perpetuate the
lack of collaboration described in the section above. Therefore,
moving toward a sustainable planning process must involve
a more self-determined approach to how financial resources
are distributed. We can challenge the short-term, incremental,
competition-based funding approaches that external funders
subject us to by having the challenging conversations around
prioritizing our goals based on a maximum positive impact
across a range of priorities.

DEVELOPING SHARED STANDARDS OF EACH OTHER
In the longer term, planning can support the responsibility that we have to our land through standards around how we care
for our land and how development happens in the community. As we develop a system of planning, it is an opportunity for us
to hold each other accountable to our cultural understandings of respect and reciprocity. When we can agree as a community
what our expectations are of each other in terms of safety, stewardship or education just to name a few, we can be leaders to
other communities. With greater trust and cohesion in governance, we can eventually create rigorous environmental and land
development standards so we can all be proud of how our community grows and leave behind a strong legacy of culturally-
based sustainable practices for the future.

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