INUVIK - It may be months before the Inuvik Works office is back up and running after it was forced to close last week when its federal funding was not renewed.

The Inuvik Works program shut its doors last week after its funding from Service Canada through the Aboriginal Skills and Employment Training Strategy didn't come through, leaving the organization to restructure in order to find funding. - Andrew Livingstone/NNSL photo

Margaret Gordon, chairperson for the committee in charge of the program, which offers support for marginalized residents, families and elders, said funding through Service Canada was not renewed this year due to changes in what was expected of the program.

"We're just closing the door temporarily until we find out where we can obtain funding from," Gordon said last week, adding the funding used to come from the Aboriginal Skills and Employment Partnerships (ASEP) program.

Three full-time staff and one part-time employee worked in the office.

Gordon said the Inuvik Works program, which has been running for more than a decade, wasn't meeting Service Canada's funding criteria, which she said has changed recently.

"It's for aboriginal people and when you get training, it has to lead to employment. The way it was running, it no longer fits under that funding," she said pointing to Inuvik Works' below-criteria numbers for employment. "We didn't see the numbers that were expected."

ASEP now focuses on supporting training opportunities for aboriginal people leading to employment in industries like mining, construction, fisheries, tourism, hydro development, and public infrastructure projects.

Inuvik Works, on the other hand, aimed "to help those who were marginalized. Those people are the ones we want to help," said Gordon.

"We do training out of there, they go to courses and other things. We work to set people in the right direction, a form of career development."

Gordon said the Gwich'in Tribal Council, Inuvialuit Regional Corporation and Department of Education, Culture and Employment officials met last week to figure out the best approach to getting the program back up and running, adding they want to register the program under a non-profit designation.

When you're not a society, your hands are tied to a lot of things so we're going to make it a non-profit society," she said. "We still want to maintain our programming, we're just trying to figure out how."

Mayor Denny Rodgers said the program provides vital services to the community such as snow removal, litter clean-up and work for elderly residents, which he said is part of a deal with the program committee where the town provides certain necessities so the program can operate.

"We provide them with the buildings and in return they give us so many hours of community work doing litter clean-up or helping with the elders," he said, adding it's an important part of the community.

Deputy mayor Chris Larocque, who sits on the Inuvik Works committee, said it being shut down will certainly be noticeable in the community.

"Everybody from the community benefits from this program so it's important to get it back up," he said. "It's designed to help elders, everybody. It's a really good program. The way it was organized was outdated so now we just have to fit ourselves into funding instead of the other way around, of finding funding to suit our needs."

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