Quilted fabric collage | Working in Good Ways cover image

The mission of our office is to increase and support experiential and community engaged learning opportunities for students to learn from and with communities and support community-led-projects within and beyond the University of Manitoba. In recent years, Community Engaged Learning (CEL) has placed work with Indigenous communities across the Americas at the centre of our work and refocused the pedagogical aims of our programs on helping students to develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary for working in good ways with Indigenous communities.

Given our team’s focus on Indigenous community engagement, we were aware of the harms that community engaged learning practitioners and students cause Indigenous communities when they approach them with a settler colonial mind-set. This project is an effort to reduce these potential harms within our field of practice. It is grounded in consultations with nearly one hundred community partners, practitioners and students, the majority of whom belong to Indigenous communities in Manitoba, Belize, Ecuador, and Chile, as well as Indigenous and non-Indigenous faculty, staff and students at the University of Manitoba.

Working in Good Ways is generously supported by the Indigenous Initiatives Fund

Working in Good Ways: a framework and resources for Indigenous community engagement

In support of the University of Manitoba’s commitment to decolonization we set out to create a framework and resources to guide us and other community engaged learning practitioners that work with Indigenous communities. The framework and resources offer a set of principles and practical strategies that community engaged learning practitioners can apply at different stages of their work with Indigenous communities. Each principle is informed by the values and practices that we learned about in our comprehensive consultations.

Download the Framework Guide

The framework organizes what we learned from the consultations into seven principles and five stages along a pathway to Indigenous Community Engagement that begins with the work before the work and continues on well beyond the close of our partnerships

WIGW Framework guide button

Order a printed and bound copy of the framework

Use this form to order a copy for your home or office! 
Copies cost $50 (includes shipping). 
Proceeds will support Community Engaged Learning reciprocity initiatives.
Contributors (see form) can order a free copy!

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