Indigenous-led, Indigenous-serving organizations are no strangers to challenge. 

Even in the face of Canada’s past and ongoing genocide of and atrocities against Indigenous people, this group of organizations has remained unwaveringly resilient in its service. 

The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has exacerbated the challenges that Indigenous Peoples face today — resulting in a growing demand for support for these communities, that Canada’s Indigenous-led and Indigenous-focused social impact sector is struggling to meet. 

But even in the midst of a global pandemic, one Indigenous-led non-profit organization — the National Association of Friendship Centres (NAFC) — has found cause for celebration.  

The NAFC is the national representative and unifying body for the Friendship Centre movement (FCM) — a movement that for fifty years has worked to connect and provide urban Indigenous communities with the essential social services and appropriate cultural sources that they require to navigate a post-colonial, so-called Canada through the establishment of Friendship Centres. 

Now, after half-a-decade of service to urban Indigenous communities, and with Friendship Centres in every province and territory except P.E.I, the NAFC is celebrating its golden anniversary from Sept. 2021 through Sept. 2022. 

In the face of COVID-19

“The last couple years have been a real downer for us because of COVID-19,” explains Jocelyn Formsma, executive director of the NAFC. Formsma explains that this was because organization’s member Friendship Centres and Provincial Territorial Associations (PTAs) were inundated with demand for their services over the course of the pandemic. 

This rise in demand for support from Indigenous communities can be explained by United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs’ (UN-DESA) findings on Indigenous Peoples and COVID-19. The UN-DESA’s website for the same notes that, “Indigenous peoples experience a high degree of socio-economic marginalization and are at disproportionate risk in public health emergencies, becoming even more vulnerable during this global pandemic, owing to factors such as their lack of access to effective monitoring and early-warning systems, and adequate health and social services.”

The UN-DESA’s findings add, “​​As lockdowns continue in numerous countries, with no timeline in sight, Indigenous peoples who already face food insecurity, as a result of the loss of their traditional lands and territories,  confront even graver challenges in access to food. With the loss of their traditional livelihoods, which are  often  land-based, many Indigenous peoples who work in  traditional occupations and subsistence economies or in the  informal sector will be adversely affected by the pandemic. The situation of Indigenous women… is even graver.” 

Further, as the Canada Helps’ Giving Report 2021 noted, only 1 percent of Canadians’ donations towards charitable organizations went towards Indigenous-led organizations — the very organizations that are primarily facing this increased demand for support services and relief programming in the face of food, housing, employment and healthcare insecurity faced by Indigenous Peoples. 

The lack of capital resources has proved to be a major obstacle for many organizations seeking to meet their communities’ needs on the front-lines, as the funding for support programs and initiatives remains disproportionate to demand from the sector for the same. 

Despite the challenges presented by the pandemic to Indigenous organizations, Formsma says that all the member organizations of the NAFC found ways to support their communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Friendship Centres across Canada were able to continue supporting their communities according to Formsma, because, “Instead of closing the doors, a lot of the centres opened their doors wider, in some sense,” she says. “Even if their people couldn’t come into the buildings, they were transitioning so quickly that they had computer kiosks on the outside of the centres for people to apply for their CERB, for instance, and help them walk through those applications.”

Formsma recollects, “There were stories about Friendship Centre staff just driving down the street and seeing a young teenage mom, who was living in a precarious living situation, and they helped her to find safer accommodations. We heard of staff cooking meals in their own homes and packaging them up to deliver to people that couldn’t or didn’t feel safe to go out and buy their own groceries or buy their own meals. Staff went out and picked up traditional medicines so that we could put them into the food baskets, so it was like, ‘here’s the home cooked meal, and here’s some medicines that can help you feel safer and comforted.’.” 

Fifty years of Friendship Centres

The 50-year anniversary has been a time to look back at how far the Friendship Centre movement has come.

In the early 1950s, Formsma says, “The [first] Friendship Centres all started up around the same time, in people’s kitchens and basements, as people just meeting up for coffee and tea and talking about ‘what we should do,’ or ‘what needs to get done,’ and then people making plans from from there.”

She explains that the consequent Friendship Centre movement emerged from those “humble beginnings”, as further centres were established by and within urban Indigenous communities across Canada. These centres were first founded with the aim to facilitate, ”impromptu ways that Indigenous people who were coming to the city could connect with each other, meet each other, help each other out, create a sense of community in these large urban spaces,” and provide a “referral service” to necessary resources, according to Formsma.

But over the next decade, the movement to form Friendship Centres burgeoned across the country. So in 1972, the NAFC was born as a country-wide not-for-profit organization purposed with spearheading and supporting the movement as it began to grow.

Now, the NAFC has now grown into a vast network of Friendship Centres, “which make up part of the Friendship Centre Movement [FCM] – Canada’s most significant national network of self-determined Indigenous owned and operated civil society community hubs offering programs, services and supports to urban Indigenous people,” according to the organization’s website. The 125 Friendship Centres and Provincial Territorial Associations who comprise the NAFC’s membership, are more than just a “referral service” today — they are each “front-line delivery vehicles of social services” to urban Indigenous populations, according to the organization’s website.

“Friendship Centres are collectives of people at the local community level, helping other people by providing services and in making and creating connections, whether it’s community and culture, or employment and training, or housing, or childcare — Friendship Centres are a place where Indigenous people go to feel safe,” says Formsma. “If you go into any city across Canada, and you ask an Indigenous person how to get to the local Friendship Centre, they’ll tell you, like, ‘oh, yeah, it’s just over there.’ And that’s the kind recognition that we have, right? People know, these are our spaces. And as one of our executive directors in Saskatchewan wisely says, it’s a place where Indigenous people are not just welcome, but they’re wanted,” she explains. 

Formsma adds that the role of the NAFC in the movement is therefore very different from that which Friendship Centres themselves play.  “While Friendship Centres serve all who come through our doors, I don’t like to describe our [NACF’s] work as just service — because what we do is more than that,” she says. Unlike its constituent Friendship Centres, the NAFC does not work on the front-lines to provide services to community members. Rather, it consults the member Friendship Centres and PTAs, so as to get an idea of their needs and how to fulfil them.

The national not-for-profit organization does this by funding and facilitating relief, support and programming for Indigenous Peoples. The NAFC also listens to and amplifies the voices of each of its local Friendship Centres and the communities they represent, in order to push for governmental policy changes that would meet the movement’s needs. 

A community celebration

With the NAFC’s support through funding and facilitating front-line services at Friendship Centres across the country, representation of their member communities at the federal and provincial levels, and networking; Friendship Centres have remained a landmark source of respite for the urban Indigenous communities that they service — despite and during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

So when the NAFC’s 50th year anniversary came around, Formsma says that her organization recognized it as a chance to celebrate those members who had been working so hard to support urban Indigenous communities across the country for half a decade now. “That was our milestone that we wanted to celebrate — being there to support people, being constant and unwavering for 50 years.”

“Even though some days, we have more money than others and some days, we have more programs than others… There’s always something happening there [at Friendship Centres] for us. At the end of the day, Indigenous people just know, ‘if I go to a Friendship center, it’s my space. It’s a place where I can feel safe and I have some ownership over what happens here’,” says Formsma. 

The NAFC commenced its celebrations this year with a virtual kick-off event on Sept. 15, “which included live music and performances from across the country, as well as special messages from key supporters of the Friendship Centre Movement.” The kick-off is set to be followed up by further anniversary celebrations, at the NAFC’s Annual Youth Forum on Nov. 26-27 and Annual General Meeting on Nov. 28- 30, this year. The event is set to be a hybrid one, as it allows for attendants to participate either in-person or online simultaneously, with the in-person event taking place on the traditional Territory of the Lekwungen Peoples in Victoria, BC.

“We saw it as an opportunity to celebrate, not the NAFC but the Friendship Centre movement as a whole,” explains Formsma, “We thought it was the right opportunity to say ‘we don’t exist without all of these communities that we support day-in and day-out’, and ‘take a look at what they’re doing, take a look at what the Friendship Centres are doing’.”. 

In time for the 50th anniversary celebrations, the organization is compiling a ‘time capsule’ of responses from its member organizations to three questions surrounding feedback and expectations for the NAFC, in order to “honour the Friendship Centre movement and mark [our] hopes for the future.” Formsma explains that these responses will be received from every Friendship Centre or PTA and documented in time for discussion at the 2022 Annual General Meeting– where the NAFC’s 50th anniversary celebrations will continue. 

Additionally, the NAFC has also unveiled a ‘rebrand’ for the organization that was detailed as part of a 10-year strategic plan put together in July 2021, ahead of the 50th anniversary celebrations. This has meant a change in logo, design, and even colour choices. 

Most importantly, Formsma points out, the rebrand entails a specific focus on the words: community, culture, connection. “We wanted something to set the tone for carrying us into the next 50 years of our work,” says Formsma, “And that’s it in a nutshell, right? We want to create a sense of community, be part of the community and bring the cultural aspect, our Indigeneity into our service and our support. What people come to us for is the connection with each other, connection to community and connection to culture.”

But the path here has not been an easy one. Formsma says, “In some ways, even though the organization’s 50 years old, I still feel like we’re new in a lot of senses because we’re still kind of fighting for recognition. We’re still fighting some of the same colonial battles as we did starting out in the 1970s. So that’s kind of frustrating. We feel like we should maybe be more of something by now. But here we are, you know, a lot of times still trying to break ground and claw for some systemic change in favour of Indigenous communities.”

“We get so used to fighting, we get so used to pushing back against everything,” Formsma explains, “And so this year is not just an anniversary celebration of us existing; I think it’s a celebration of us persisting, and being present and relevant and consistent for a half century.”

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