Business in the Classroom

Education gives aboriginal students the support and knowledge to succeed as entrepreneurs

By: Sarah Hartwick, Staff Writer

Jacob Pratt is a businessman, but he’s also an artist – a dancer and flutist trained in the traditional Dakota style. Two years ago, while in his second year of a business degree at the First Nations University of Canada, he was enjoying so much success that he wasn’t able to take on all of the performances being offered to him. Inspired by his classes, he had an idea.

“As an emerging artist I was becoming more and more developed,” he says.“I started getting more performances than I could actually do myself. I started offering people the performances that I couldn’t do myself, and then quickly as a business student, I realized that there was an actual business opportunity that was available that wasn’t really being done at the moment.”

Pratt founded Wambdi Dance, a company that connects performers with event planners. Then, on the advice of one of his professors, he took his idea to The Boom Box, a competition for young, aboriginal entrepreneurs hosted by the CBC and Dragon’s Den businessman W. Brett Wilson.

Pratt placed first in the competition, winning$2,500 in funding and a three-month mentorship to help guide him as he launched his company.

The key to succeeding, says Pratt, was his education. Now in his fourth year of studies, he says that university has given him the tools to start his business.

“It helped give me a lot of guidance and rather than learning by trial and error, I was given the outline on how to do it, which I found has actually shaped the way that I process information when I’m thinking about my business,” he says.

He adds, “There are business people out there who have not taken university classes and have become successful, but [that is] a unique case, I think. For me, personally, university was a huge help.”

Promoting entrepreneurship among youth through education is the basis of a program created by the Martin Aboriginal Education Initiative, the foundation started by former Prime Minister Paul Martin.

The Initiative created the Aboriginal Youth Entrepreneurship Program, or AYEP. The program consists of two secondary school courses: one for grade 11 students and one for grade 12 students. The courses are implemented in high-risk schools in regions with an aboriginal-majority population, and focus on teaching business skills and entrepreneurship to students with support from the local aboriginal community.

Administrative Director Lucie Santoro says the aim of the program is to give kids a reason to stay in school until graduation as well asencouraging them to pursue post-secondary education.

“The purpose of our whole initiative is to give them the opportunities and equal treatment, to look at education as a world that’s open to them,” she says.

In the grade 12 course, students are asked to create a business based on a product or a service they can provide. The results are diverse – Santoro says she’s heard of students coming up with everything from making and selling traditional jewelry and dolls to teaching local seniors to use the internet.

Santoro says that the Institution doesn’t shy away from the communities that are struggling. Rather, she says, “we wanted schools that had the biggest challenges.”

The program now runs in 16 schools across the country, each with a program that is tailored to provincial requirements and the needs of each school.The textbooks for the courses are completely original, written by two teachers involved with the program and designed to reflect and appeal to the students.

In Canada, only 40 per cent of on-reserve and 57 per cent of off-reserve aboriginal students will graduate from high school. The Martin Initiative says in its public brochure that it has found that 70 per cent of the students who take these courses finish them, and most of these students go on to graduate.

It isn’t just the aboriginal community that will benefit from programs like AYEP working to raise graduation rates and lead aboriginal students towards post-secondary education. Labour force studies have shown for several years that encouraging aboriginal students could have positive effects on the Canadian economy as a whole.

Free to Learn, a study published in 2010 by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute,identifies aboriginal youth as an economic asset in the face of a coming wave of retiring baby boomers. According to Statistics Canada, 28 per cent of Canada’s First Nations, Metis, and Inuit population are 14 years old or younger, compared to 19 per cent in the rest of the population. These children have the potential to be valuable resources.

“Canada’s population is growing slowly and greying, while the Aboriginal population is growing rapidly and is much younger,” the study says. It adds later, “Whatever way one looks at it, the data say the same thing: as the Canadian labour force remains stable or stagnant while the economy is growing, the potential labour pool of Aboriginals is growing rapidly. The labour force implications are already here.”

A 2011 study by the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business entitled Promise and Prosperity: The Aboriginal Business Survey says that between 2001 and 2006, the number of self-employed aboriginal people rose by 38 per cent – five times the increase recorded in self-employed non-aboriginal people. Despite this growth, the total proportion of aboriginal business owners remains at about half that of the rest of the population.

One of the major roadblocks to aboriginal entrepreneurship, particularly among young people, is a lack of access to capital. The Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business points out that roughly half of aboriginal business owners don’t borrow funds to start their businesses.

“Aboriginal small business owners consider access to financing, and access to equity or capital to be obstacles to their growth plans,” says the report.

The Council speculates in a report from 2006 on the same subject that lack of capital access may be a “contributing factor for the self-employment gap” between aboriginal business owners and non-aboriginal business owners

Pratt says there is a lot of potential for aboriginal business people to help their communities. Many aboriginal people, he says, are naturally creative and entrepreneurial.

“It’s a matter of finding the right kind of business, understanding how to do it and getting a lot of capital. Capital is really difficult to come by for anybody. And the more aboriginal entrepreneurs there are, the more capital is going to be available for other aboriginal entrepreneurs,” he says.

“That’s the whole idea, to keep this whole process of entrepreneurial spirit growing and developing. That’ll help increase an economy of aboriginal communities “

The success of these business-owners can have a profound effect on everyone around them.

“Aboriginal entrepreneurs are helping to improve the negative socio-economic conditions experienced in so many aboriginal communities and families through unemployment,” says the 2006report by the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business.

And not only do aboriginal entrepreneurs create new capital and job opportunities, seeing members of their own community as successful business people can be deeply inspirational to youth.

“It’s also very good to see aboriginal people succeeding in contemporary society; contributing to Canadian society as well as standing strong with traditional values. It helps instill a sense of identity and pride in a lot of aboriginal communities,” says Pratt.

When the Martin Initiative is going through the selection process to partner with a new school, Santoro says that they won’t choose a school or a district until they know that the local aboriginal community will agree to be involved.

“They’re introduced to a whole group of community leaders,” says Santoro. “Whether it be the teacher, the principal, the school, their chief, the whole community – when they’re introduced and they feel the support around the room saying, ‘we’re investing in you, and you can do it,’ it’s a very powerful message.”

Members of the community, often elders, will give presentations to the students, and Santoro says that this is essential for not only giving the students a sense of their culture and history, but also to show relatable figures and examples of strong leaders.

Following his success with The Boom Box competition, Pratt’s company has grown to the point where he’s able to invest in other start-ups he thinks have potential. He’s restructuring his company to allow for expansion, to bring in partners and to keep giving back to the community.

“If I wasn’t in school and didn’t get my education, I don’t think I would have been able to have developed a successful business as I have. It helps you think outside the box and be able to effectively judge risk, and figure out what opportunities are really worth taking the risk and which ones aren’t,” he says.

“I want to keep it growing and keep engaging other aboriginal people.”

Bio: Sarah Hartwick is a freelance writer and an avid traveler. In her spare time, she works with Schools Building Schools, a growing NGO that’s striving to spread access to education throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Check out her blog to follow her adventures around the globe.