Ilisaqsivik Society, through our Family Resource Centre, is working to achieve community wellness by providing people with a place where they can come to connect with themselves, with their families and with their community. We provide programs that will help them develop their strengths and find joy in living.

Our community, Clyde River, is a small remote settlement located in central Baffin Island, Nunavut. The land is very beautiful here, and Inuit families know every part of the great fiords and islands in this area because for generations they have camped along the sea, summer and winter, harvesting caribou, seals, whales and other animals for food, clothing, transportation and shelter.

At first, when qallunaat whalers and explorers first began to come to our area, we welcomed them as we did all other people, not knowing what changes they would be bringing to our lives. We accepted everything they told us and gave us, trusting that they were right and safe. It was not until later that we realized that by welcoming their ways and ideas we had thrown our lives into chaos. We thought that we needed to always listen to the qallunaat because they seemed to always be in authority over us. We had to learn the hard way how to be safe with this new culture.

In the 1960's, families were made by government officials to come off the land and settle in the small community of Clyde River at the end of Patricia Bay. With this shift in living arrangements, came a shift in social and cultural lifestyles, and it all happened very quickly. Inuit, who knew how to be safe in every way on the land, had to learn all the new ways of being safe around houses, with bacteria and viruses from the qallunaat, using addictive substances like tobacco and alcohol, adapting to the use of rifles and motors, living with English Law, and getting used to a community where a relatively large number of people lived in a small area, which created in turn new social challenges.

Building this knowledge of the safety measures in a community setting has taken years and has had a price. Our community still struggles with addictions, disease and ill-health, violence and accidents. We live in an area where the suicide rate is the highest in North America. In most families there are many layers of grief, shame, trauma and abandonment. This is not so different from many other small remote communities in Canada.

The most important thing, however, is that we have survived. We have survived years of economic depression and rampant cultural and social change. But we are no longer content with being just survivors (victims). We are now going about the healing of ourselves, our families and our community. We believe that it is time to take responsibility to meet our four basic needs of Love and Belonging, Empowerment, Freedom of Choice and the need for Play, in healthy and appropriate ways. In so doing we are gradually finding the resources within ourselves to build a healthy, happy community with a good future in sight for our children. This has not been time wasted, we have learned a lot from the things we have gone through.

In 1996, concerned residents representing several community organizations began to meet, focusing on finding the means to do, in our own way, the social and cultural development that we knew our community needed. From the onset, Ilisaqsivik Society has focused on involvement with others, Inuit culture and language, training, information-sharing and healthy life skills and practices.

After becoming incorporated in 1997, Ilisaqsivik Society obtained the old Health Centre building. Thanks to the Government of the NWT and the Hamlet of Clyde River, we own the building free and clear. This has meant freedom for us to develop the projects and programs we want in the way they best meet the needs of our community members.

Originally, five community groups banded together to move into the old health centre and make the space their own. In the first year, there was no co-ordinator employed. A volunteer came in twice a month to do payroll for the six people working at the Centre, and we originally wondered how we could use all of the rooms at the Centre.

In 2001, we had 123 employees hired over the year, 10 fulltime, 28 daily half or part time, and the rest employed casually. Another 50 people or so are involved in one of the 10 Ilisaqsivik program committees on a volunteer basis, directing the programs and projects of the Centre. This fiscal year, there are 33 projects on the go, and we serve 100 to 200 people per day, usually six days per week. Today, we are bursting out the seams of our building, at times having to find space at the parish hall or the adult education centre.

Thanks to territorial and federal government programs and some northern companies, such as First Air, the Northwest Company and Nunavut Construction, Ilisaqsivik has been able to do a lot of good things for our community. As a registered charity, we are actively seeking corporate sponsors and private donors to help us realize our vision of a healthy, whole community.