Happy belated Canada Day to everyone and welcome to the hot, happy days of summer. We hope everyone is doing well as we enjoy this incredible long weekend.
Our Summer Program Workshops began in June and we are almost done our very first run of this exciting pilot program. We can’t express enough how terrific and rewarding an experience it was for our incubator for digital arts and cultural entrepreneurship to be able to meet, connect and learn from so many of the people and projects many of us have only been able to engage with online, for the last two years.
Auviqsaqtut was an incredible success. Despite being a few team members short due to graduation ceremonies that week, we had a very healthy turnout of 15 participants for our workshop. For those who are reading online, when we decided to launch this project in November 2021, we were very uncertain of what was possible and chose to work with a small team for this pilot of 4-6 participants. Not much more than six months into our project, we are hitting numbers as high as 15. Thanks to everyone who came out and supported our youth. We are especially grateful to our friends and collaborators from British Columbia, the Northwest Territories and Northwestern Ontario who were able to join us for this first international conference together.
We are immensely grateful to the University of Winnipeg, Qaumajuq and the Winnipeg Art Gallery, along with all the organizers and people who came to attend this year’s Inuit Studies Conference. For many of us, it has been two years since we were able to come together like this, and for almost all of our participating youth, it was the very first time.
The Canada Day long weekend kicked off a week of activities ranging from conference sessions for the Auviqsaqtut Inuit Studies Conference, connecting with researchers, artists and youth from new arts and research projects in communities like Winnipeg, Windsor, Arviat and Tuktoyaktuk. The results sharing workshops as part of our Winnipeg-based incubator for digital and cultural entrepreneurship could only have been made possible the with support from the Canada Council for the Arts and Minneapolis College of Art And Design.
A special thanks to Chocolatier Constance Popp and Constance Menzies for always supporting our community arts and entrepreneurship projects. We really believe in supporting local businesses and entrepreneurs because it’s those businesses and the support they give projects like our digital arts and cultural entrepreneurship incubator program makes everything possible. From hosting meetings when we didn’t have any other place to meet, to facilitating our entrepreneurship workshops in new and really cool ways, we couldn’t really do any of it without that support. So the next time you are in St. Boniface, stop by Chocolatier Constance Popp for some of Canada’s best chocolate!
The results sharing workshops we held last month as part of our Winnipeg-based incubator for digital and cultural entrepreneurship could only have been made possible the with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, Manitoba Arts Council and Minneapolis College of Art And Design. As our pilot program begins to wind down at the end of this month, we are very excited to be planning a fall and winter program, which will begin in late September.
Until then, we wish everyone a safe, happy and healthy summer filled with connection, creativity and community. See you next week.
