ICE Network CoLab Summary: Indigenous Clean Energy Project Partnerships | Project Development and Diesel Reduction

Event date: Wednesday, June 12^th at 13:00 EDT

Background

Indigenous clean energy projects often involve partners, but there are a wide variety of structures and purposes for these partnerships. This CoLab was designed to profile a couple of great examples of partnerships between Indigenous communities and development partners to demonstrate what a highly functional partnership could look like and to show what the benefits are to be partnering with the right organization.

CoLab Resources

• CoLab Host: Calvin Waquan, Councilor of the Mikisew Cree Band Council and President of 3 Nations Energy;
• Chief Gerry Duquette, Dokis First Nation;
• Councilor Denise Restoule, former Chief of Dokis First Nation and leader on the Okikendawt Project;
• Terri Lynn Morrison, Director of Strategic Partnerships and Communications, Indigenous Clean Energy, and former Project Director of the 150 MW Mesgi’g Ugju's’n wind project;
• Cherie Brant, Partner, Indigenous Law, Borden Ladner Gervais LLP
• Chris Henderson, Executive Director, Indigenous Clean Energy Social Enterprise

Key Experiences and Lessons Learned from the Profiled Projects

• For Chief Gerry Duquette and Councillor Denise Restoule, the key learnings that were shared were:

• Select a partner that will be very respectful to your community, culture, and vision
• Being hands-on in a project partnership means that the community voice will remain strong and true in the project
• When you consider the future of the project, you could be impacting your community for many years, so the care you show in your decision-making should also be shown by your partner
• Terri Lynn Morrison shared her key experiences that made for a strong partnership:
• Defining a clear vision for how the project and partnership should work before engaging with a partner is important so that the partnership can be set on clear principals and goals
• Creating a list of requirements or qualifications that must be met before the project communities would consider a partnership proposal made it possible to focus their time only on those partner candidates which would be able to complete the project.
• Consider whether your community will be held liable for financial recourse in the project structuring in case the project is prematurely shuttered and create partnership structures to limit the liability to the project company.

What Makes for a Great Partner on a Clean Energy Project?

• Having very clear goals and vision for the outcome of the partnership.
• Being organized and having information ready when it’s needed.
• Interest and desire to build relationships and trust between the organization and the community.
• Honesty and transparency, and the ability to listen to understand, not just to respond.
• Motivated in making capacity building part of the objectives so that the community partner(s) develop their skills and capacity to build a common knowledge base.
• Interested and motivated to learn about the community(s) and the ways in which local, traditional and cultural ways of knowing shape the Indigenous world view.
• A great partner will already have values and goals that are aligned with those in the community

How to Create “Better Best Practices” for Indigenous Clean Energy Partnerships

Have a really clear picture of how you envision your role in the partnership, right from the beginning. Are you going to play a passive partnership role? Are you looking to secure a revenue stream, or be more on the other side of the spectrum, like the Dokis hydro project and the Mesgi’g Ugju’s’n wind project where they were very hands-on? Being clear about this from the start is going to make your search for the right partner easier and set the expectation for the partnership right away.
- Cherie Brant

Indigenous communities and their Partners who may have done a renewable energy project should start looking at other ways that energy can be leveraged as an opportunity to help the community in more than just electrical generation. That could be in large-scale can be Energy Efficiency, it could and looking at district energy, it could be looking at storage, it could be looking at the electrification of the transportation economy. So, to my mind, raising the bar is building on the strengths of the existing Partnerships who could both be on renewable energy into other areas of making sure that are in our energy economy and opportunities are taken advantage of. I think that's the next frontier of how indigenous clean energy will forward.
- Chris Henderson

Look at the long-term needs of the project and think about how you can develop supports for training and employment within your community so that long-term benefits can exist for people who want to be involved and can get that training to start a career in that area. And during construction, we looked at training for our local staff that they could use for this project, but which could also help them branch out into related fields, whether it was linesmen who could work for the mining sector, or in contracting companies of their own.
- Terri Lynn Morrison

CoLab Attendees

Vanessa Abban, Jason Aitchison, Dustin Alvarez, Raed (Rod) Arab, KETAN BHALLA, David Beauvais, Karim Belmokhtar, Ernest Belyea, Andrew Berselli, Tamás Bertényi, Sergey Bolotov, Stuart Bowman, Susan Brewer, Dave Brookes, Carl Brothers, Darrell Brown, Kimberley Brown, Ricky Buch, Eric Cantin, Chantelle Cardinal, Leon Cardinal, Vladi Cargo, Ian Carter, Heather Chia, Shivani Chotalia, Moah Christensen, Curran Crawford, David Crombie, Louis Desgrosseilliers, Andrea Diaz Osorio, Robbie Donaldson, Steven Donaldson, Roby Douglas, Tom Du, Pierre Dumas, Leila Durante, Barry Edgar, Najee Elbaroudi, Chris Ellement, AJ Esquega, Andrew Evans, Nick Fedorkiw, Luc Fortin, Sheena Francis, Francois Gagnon, Renald Gauthier, Angela Gerbrandt, Bill Gioskos, Waleed Giratalla, Barb Gray, Tracy Green, Alexa Greig, Clare Gutjahr, Robert Hanley, Camille Heidelberger, Clayton Hiles, Darryl Hill, Rosemary , Hughes, Mrs. Anuraga Jain, Stephen James, Rajesh Jayaraman, Liz Johnson, GRANT KELBA, Iman Kaffashan, Chris Keast, Mojtaba Kheiri, Tracy Kimathi, Andrew King, Morice Labossiere, Julien Lafaille, Dexter Lam, Stephanie Landers, Kaya Lange, Spencer Langlois, Carole Leblanc, Martha Lenio, Sheena Li, Jackie Luker, Adam Lynes-Ford, IAIN MACKIE, Terry Mactaggart, Alexandra Mallett, Dr. Abdullah Al Mamun, John Masakhwe, Jason McCullough, Joshua  McEvoy, Lorraine Moir, Murray Morello, Bailey Murdoch, Ragu Nathan, Mitchell Niles, Terry Nother, Tanja Nuske, Matthew Obee, Tagwongo Obomsawin, Javier Oyanedel, Jonathan Palmer, Jeff Pedersen, Douglas Penner, Su Peter, Chris Peters, JP Pinard, Sal Poirier, Kamyar Pooyeh, Tasina Pope, Emma Power, Steffen Preusser, Joann Priestley, Steven Qiu, Cody Reaume, Pierre Rivard, Niamh Roche, Katie Robertson, John Robinson, Jimmy Royer, Duncan Sanderson, Ian Scholten, Minoo Shariat-zadeh, Michelle Shephard, Tal Sherepanov, Peter Sigurdson, Carla Slobozian, Garry Spence, Harriet Stanford, Jim Stauffer, Yuya Taniura, Alison Thompson, Adam Trovato, Tim Tutcho, Christine Unghy, Bhavesh Upadhyay, Harley Upton, Eduardo Uranga, Bonnie Van Tassel, Mary Vasey, Nicola Vaughan, Calvin Waquan, Catherine Warren, Sharon , Waughtal, Niki Westman, Pip White, Dylan Whiteduck, Bill Williams, Joerg Wittenbrinck, Douglas Yeaman, Kimberly Zackodnik, Julia Zeeman, Vienna Zhou