First Nation’s students will be getting a re-imagined university department in north-end Winnipeg. The site is the home of a former down and out hotel, that was closed in 2012 when the level of neglect, and poverty in the area, allowed the building to become a centre for the drug-trade and gangs that terrorized the neighbourhood.
Now it is a beacon of hope for the future and a new way of providing education to people for whom that may not have been an option in the past. Professor Jim Silver, Chair of the University of Winnipeg”s Urban and Inner City studies program, is one of the visionaries.
Professor Silver acknowledges that Winnipeg, known as “Canada’s most racist city”, according to Macleans magazine, has a challenge. He says there is “a huge divide between the inner city which has a particularly high proportion of aboriginal people on the one hand, and the suburbs where there are very few aboriginal people, on the other”.
In keeping with one of the recommendations of the recently released report from the Truth & Reconciliation Comission, he and his collaborators at several levels of government and academia, are tailoring the educational opportunities to the local residents.
“People are thrilled”
In an effort to eliminate education and employment gaps between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people, this campus, known now as ‘Merchant’s Corner’ will have smaller than average classes, include 30 units of housing and daycare, for the students that have children, and be a shared space welcoming high school students in the evening for tutoring and mentoring. Professor Silver says this dual purpose, of university education by day and high school support later, is unique in Canada.
Professor Silver explained the university has been operating in the neighbourhood out of a small store-front since 2010. He says the enrolment has grown by a factor of 5, and that weekly they receive queries from 3 or 4 people walking in wanting to register as a result of word of mouth recommendations.
They plan on outreach initiatives to the nearby high schools and junior highs, where Silver says, kids are really making up their mind about their future. The work on the new centre begins at the end of August. Professor Silver says “we will be “in the ground” pouring the foundation in late October-early November 2015; we expect the building to be completed by December 2016; and I hope to be teaching in Merchants Corner at the start of the Winter term, January 2017″.
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