Indigenous Student Services: Creating Community at First Nations House
In search of factors driving student engagement, First Nations House partnered with the Innovation Hub in summer 2018 to ask: what causes students and staff to engage and connect with First Nations House? Among the factors identified—including assistance with scholarships and housing, personal relationships to staff members. and access to the resource centre—cultural and social programming emerged as a need strongly felt by students. Thus, First Nations House and the Innovation Hub renewed their partnership to investigate what sorts of social and cultural programming students want.
Fall/Winter 2019-2020
What do students want out of cultural and social programming at Indigenous Student Services?
The insights and findings from our 2019 work are based on data from the project & events conducted with the community from 2018-2019. This helped to expand the findings and focus on themes & actionable steps for the community. We focused on the importance of community, which we subdivide into three levels of community-based interactions.
KEY FINDINGS
Students want to find a community that welcomes them and genuinely supports their individual journeys
This sense of belonging and support emerges on many levels:
- Physical Level: Having a welcoming, accessible space.
- Cultural and Social Level: Feeling accepted as themselves and as whole people.
- Wider Level: Knowing that this community is doing something for their wider community.
There are ample opportunities for First Nations House to make concrete changes to its current programming and to better serve Indigenous students. Impactful changes might be made based on the insights about engaging with the wider community (using Indigenous Education Week as a model) and how students’ comfort level with their Indigenous identity interacts with their sense of belonging at cultural events. These insights are highly robust, and reveal interesting tensions within the Indigenous student population at the University.
