A $1 million donation has enabled SFU’s Beedie School of Business to launch a program geared towards supporting Aboriginal entrepreneurs.
The First Peoples Enterprise Accelerator (FPEA) was made possible by a contribution made from the RBC foundation. It has also funded several scholarships for Aboriginal students interested in entrepreneurship.
The accelerator, which will be run out of RADIUS (RADical Ideas, Useful to Society), a business incubator within the Beedie School, will help fledgling ventures get off their feet and assist in the growth of more mature enterprises.
The FPEA was originally conceived to be part of the First Peoples House, which was proposed in 2012 as a centre for Aboriginal students, faculty, and staff on Burnaby Campus. Once the First Peoples House project is complete, the two ventures will be linked.
Donovan Woollard, ventures director at RADIUS, spoke to the origin of FPEA: “SFU and the RBC Foundation were in conversation around how to have a lasting impact and the concept of supporting entrepreneurship in First Nations communities came up as an exciting prospect.”
This winter, the Enterprise Accelerator will welcome its first cohort. Over the next six months, RADIUS will be “figuring out what do Aboriginal entrepreneurs need and what are the places where we can help them with those needs.” Woollard added, “[There] are lots of ways to waste $1 million and only a few ways to actually add some real value.”
RADIUS is currently assessing how this particular enterprise accelerator will function. “One of the key questions we’re still grappling with is, ‘are we going to work in individual geographic communities, or are we going to focus on certain sectors that serve a number of different Aboriginal communities?’” said Woollard. He suggested renewable energy as a possible sector on which to focus.
The scholarships are being offered through the Executive MBA in Aboriginal Business and Leadership program. RBC will fund $30,000 in financial awards each year to four students for the next 10 years.
Mark Selman, program director for this EMBA, explained the benefits of such financial support: “The EMBA program costs over $50,000 to take and so for most people, finding sources of support is important.”
Selman noted that since SFU launched the EMBA program forty years ago, in each cohort there has only been on average half a dozen Aboriginal students. The enrolment for the EMBA in Aboriginal Business has risen to 25 Aboriginal students out of 30 in the second cohort of the program. “It’s probably the largest number of Aboriginal students studying business together in North America.”
A large number of First Nations communities have pioneered economic development including the Stó:lō nation in the Fraser Valley and the West Bank nation in the Okanagan, the latter of which has 400 businesses located in its reserve territory. Selman commented, “Each of those areas and many other communities have programs of one sort or another, but I think it will add to the mix to be able to provide certain university level programs.”
Woollard acknowledged that an integral part of the success of the initiative as a whole will be “recognizing that, historically, Aboriginal communities in Canada have been quite purposely marginalized by the settler communities.
“A program like this is very much just one step in coming to a place where we’re starting to undo some of the very gross injustices of the past.”
