INUVIK - Peggy Day flips through the months on a placemat-sized calendar spread across her desk, turning pages marked with pen and highlighter as she points out specific dates.

Peggy Day, program co-ordinator for the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, has organized a number of workshops to help people heal from such issues as residential school trauma. Funding for the foundation, which is under the umbrella of the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, is set to expire in March 2010. - Katie May/NNSL photo

"We just finished a couple's retreat here in Inuvik," she says, enthusiastically. "After that," she continues, "I'm bringing in a group from Blueprint for Life and they do the Arctic hip hop thing to train the kids in breakdancing."

Day is the Aboriginal Healing Foundation program co-ordinator. She oversees the community co-ordinators stationed in the Inuvialuit settlement region and organizes a wide range of workshops - from grief counselling to breakdancing - aimed at residential school survivors and their families.

"We're not only dealing with just the adults - we're dealing with the youth, the children, the elders, everybody, she says. "It's not only the survivors, per se, because what they experienced reflects on their kids, too."

Day, a mother of seven and a grandmother of five with three more grandchildren on the way, was born and raised in Inuvik. She's been in the job since October. Before that, she worked in the human resources department of the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation (IRC), the healing foundation's umbrella organization.

Day says her background in human resources helps a lot in her current position, since much of it involves maintaining good contacts in all of the communities, planning events, and number-crunching to get funding approvals - she keeps a calculator bigger than a telephone right next to her computer. It sits below the Inuvialuktun Lord's Prayer tacked up on her wall, amid family photos.

"You have to be a real caring person, I think, to do this job - a certain personality, I think, and I just love it," she says. "It feels so good to help people."

She often visits the workshops she organizes - once at the beginning and again at the end - to see how her team's work changes people.

"To see the people being healed, (it's) like a big weight is being lifted off their shoulders. When you see them going into the workshop, they don't know what they're getting into and it's all so brand new, all the healing that's happening," Day says.

"You just see such a difference in the person (after the workshop) because they're learning how to deal with their past history and learning how to handle it all."

"The downside is that March 31 is the sunset of this Aboriginal Healing Foundation funding," she adds.

The IRC, along with the national Inuit organization Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, have applied for more funding under Health Canada to keep the foundation alive.

Day says people of the North have only just started to benefit from the healing workshops the foundation provides.

"Finally people are starting to come out of their shell and say 'yes, we do need help' and they're more willing to take part in our workshops," she says. "We've got all our fingers and toes crossed that they'll extend the program."