There is a house in Winnipeg where everyone’s kookum lives. No matter the reason, families can drop off their children to this safe and loving home, where a kookum, or grandmother in Cree, and several aunties can keep an eye on them. 

While Kookum’s House is run by Blue Thunderbird Family Care, an Indigenous family services organization, it doesn’t just serve as an emergency drop-off centre for families going through a crisis. Kookum’s House can also be a place for parents to leave their kids before going shopping. It’s a straightforward way to help families going through stressful times that doesn’t resort to the child welfare system — and did not come out of a case study. 

“Kookum’s House came into being not because it’s been researched to death or because there’s longitudinal studies that prove something,” says Diane Roussin, executive director of the Winnipeg Boldness Project, who helped develop the project. “It was us as a community saying: we need this. This will work. Families are asking for it.” 

Plenty of Winnipeg-based social impact organizations run programs focused on child and family welfare. The Winnipeg Boldness Project works a little differently. Instead of running their own programs, they work with a variety of non-profits, charities, researchers, and community residents within the North End to test out new approaches to family services. Put simply, they act as a laboratory for new program ideas sourced from community members themselves. “It’s a place where we can experiment. It’s where we can take risks,” Roussin says. “I think that’s why some of our funders don’t mind putting their money into us — because we can be the risk takers.”

The Winnipeg Boldness Project launched in 2014 in what residents call the North End — several neighbourhoods that include North and South Point Douglas — to address local issues around child and family welfare. Point Douglas is described on the project’s website as a neighbourhood with “tremendous community spirit”, but also one with a number of challenges. According to census data from the City of Winnipeg, the unemployment rate for North and South Point Douglas is 12.5 percent, nearly double that of the rest of Winnipeg. Average incomes are half of the city’s average. 

Poverty is an issue in the neighbourhood, but so too is the removal of Indigenous children by the foster care system. More than a third of the neighbourhood’s residents identify as Indigenous in a province where Indigenous children are disproportionately represented in foster care. According to Maclean’s, nearly 90 percent of Manitoba’s children in care are Indigenous, even though Indigenous people comprise only 18 percent of the province’s population. 

The Winnipeg Boldness Project was launched with financial support from the McConnell Foundation and the Manitoba government to find new ways to improve the lives of children and families in the neighbourhood of Point Douglas with the guidance of local residents. “While Point Douglas does face challenges, more importantly we know that the families that live here know what’s best for their children and know what they need to find solutions to this complex issue,” reads a section of the project’s website. 

“While Point Douglas does face challenges, more importantly we know that the families that live here know what’s best for their children and know what they need to find solutions to this complex issue.”

For their first year or two in operation, the Winnipeg Boldness Project team spoke with residents, parents, volunteers and leaders to learn about their priorities. Roussin and her staff spent the next several years after that developing program prototypes. These include the Indigenous Doula Initiative, inspired by factors such as a higher rate of infant mortality and traumatic births among Indigenous mothers. 

Starting in 2013, the Manitoba Indigenous Doula Initiative (MIDI) began a three-year period of consultations with Indigenous grandmothers and other community members. By 2016, the project and MIDI opened applications for Indigenous women to train as doulas. A week’s worth of the program offered standard doula training along with traditional Indigenous rites of passage. Currently, according to the project’s website, MIDI is providing training sessions for healthcare providers with the Kenora Chiefs Advisory, the Brandon Friendship Centre, and Nanaandawewigamig: First Nations Health and Social Secretariat of Manitoba. 

Unlike traditional service delivery models, local families are involved with designing the Winnipeg Boldness Project’s initiatives from the get-go. “They’re giving us feedback every time they’re working through the prototype,” Roussin says. 

Her staff act as facilitators for conversations among residents — setting up a meeting space, preparing food, and guiding discussions. The project works with four different ‘guide groups’ or circles that include local Elders, leaders of local non-profits, academics, and around 15 caregivers who live in Winnipeg’s North End. All four groups meet on a regular basis to offer guidance and feedback on the project’s research and guidance. 

Over the course of designing a new prototype, Roussin says, she and her staff are constantly writing down the group’s ideas and processing them. “We’re trying to reach a place where all of the circles are mostly nodding their heads,” Roussin says. “Then we know — this is what the community is really saying.” 

The project’s other prototypes include the Baby Basket, developed with the North End Women’s Centre, to deliver collections of goods, supports, and information to new parents — a way to not only offer assistance, but build trust between families and healthcare providers. Another is Supports for Dads, a prototype inspired by the North Point Douglas Women’s Centre’s Men’s Sharing Circle that focuses on helping dads in the Point Douglas neighbourhood raise their kids, heal from trauma, and improve their parenting skills. 

In the coming years, Roussin says her organization hopes to move into actually scaling these prototypes. “Most of our community partners aren’t resourced and don’t have the time to do that work,” she says. Meanwhile, COVID-19 is adding an additional curveball to their work. Roussin says their partner organizations are checking on their clients by phone and dropping off food and other essentials to families, but the in-person community gatherings used by the Winnipeg Boldness Project to brainstorm new ideas are effectively gone. Families would go to the project’s building to meet, eat together, and smudge. “All that stuff, we did in person,” she says. 

But the pandemic isn’t stopping the Winnipeg Boldness Project. Earlier in March, the Manitoba government gave $500,000 as part of a two-year funding agreement, one Roussin hopes will be matched by the McConnell Foundation. This is the first time the project has received multi-year government funding, although Roussin says she’s asked for it repeatedly. Meanwhile, the project is still developing prototypes. Their latest one may combine their Indigenous Doulas, Supports for Dads, and Baby Basket initiatives into a single wraparound program. 

It is classic Boldness — a social innovation philosophy combined with a collaborative approach Roussin credits to her Indigenous mentors in social impact. “It just makes my head explode with the brilliance of it,” she says. 

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