Welcome to the Multimedia Toolkit for the «Social innovation in support of women's collective entrepreneurship based on the traditional knowledge of Cree women» project.

Since CWEIA was incorporated, our members, who are the main producers of traditional arts and crafts, always ask that the association start a project in that respect, since art has been a way to preserve cultural knowledge and pass it on from one generation to the next. CWEIA has been a supporter of the social economy since the beginning of the regional partners’ organizing around the topic through the CSERT in 2012. The second orientation CWEIA’s Strategic Plan 2016-2020 is to Nourish the Ground for Women’s Empowerment, and one of the associated strategies is to Develop and support women’s individual and collective entrepreneurship. In CWEIA’s Strategy to Impulse Women’s Entrepreneurship 2017-2020, CWEIA reasserts its support for the values of the social economy, and places its intention to support the birth of collective businesses controlled and managed by Cree women.

From August 2016 to March 2018, CWEIA has worked together with Niska, a community and organizational development consulting cooperative, and CIRADD, a research centre on sustainable development, to design an action research project to anchor CWEIA’s strategies into reality. The action research project was an opportunity to empower Cree women through entrepreneurship. We received funding from the Community and College Social Innovation Fund (CCSIF) of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Research and transfer support programme of MEES.

The action research project main objectives were:

1. Better understand the current available technical and financial support system for Cree women entrepreneurs;
2. Design and implement a collective business in arts and crafts controlled and managed by women that respects Cree women’s traditional skills and values;
3. Research and experiment with processes to support Cree women entrepreneurship’s more effectively in the specific context of Eeyou Istchee.

The action research project has the following key outcomes:

• Profile of the Cree Entrepreneurial Support System
• Multimedia Guide, with key learnings in video format
• Final Report of Project
• Business Canvas Model for the cooperative
• Standardization of the prices for key items

You will find eight videos below; together they form the MultiMedia Toolkit, which is the way we chose to communicate what we learned through the project.

We recommend you watch them in sequence. We hope you enjoy watching!