KANGIQTUGAAPIK/CLYDE RIVER
After weeks spent poring over funding proposals and pulling numerous all-nighters to meet a March-end deadline, Jake Gearheard, executive director of the Ilisaqsivik Society in Clyde River now waits.
Ilisaqsivik board of directors chair Josie Enuaraq, left, and Jake Gearhead in Ottawa last December accepting the Prime Minister's Volunteer Award for Social Innovation to Ilisaqsivik Society. - photo courtesy of Jake Gearhead
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He can tell you a thing or two about community-based development. March, his busiest time of year turns into April, his slowest, as the Ilisaqsivik Society awaits what programs are given the go-ahead.
While Gearhead helped bring Ilisaqsivik out of a hole $100,000 deep, finances remain precarious as it's "all proposal-driven funding that could go away any second."
"Pizza sales and string-pulls aren't going to pay the heating bill," said Gearhead, listing a swath of local initiatives run by the community-based, not-for-profit such as land-based programs, prenatal nutrition, a preschool, community library and school breakfast program. The society also works with Baffinland and other major economic drivers to prepare local workforces.
Like the exhausting up-down cycle of annual funding, Gearhead said the boom-bust nature of mining is eased when a community is prepared. To that end, Ilisaqsivik's new business arm Tukumaaq Inc. plans to build suites-style accommodations in Clyde River so more people can visit the hamlet and profits can be reinvested back as stable funding.
"We have big plans at Ilisaqsivik," said Gearhead.
Gearhead moved to Clyde River in November 2004 to take over the co-ordinator position at Ilisaqsivik. He and his now-wife Shari were living in Somerville, Mass. She was doing her post-doctorate at Harvard and he was a geographer doing his PhD at the University of Colorado. He'd worked in Peru doing community development projects to do with eco-tourism and the like, which was all very well and theoretical, he said, but he had a nagging doubt his projects weren't truly community-based so long as the money and many of the ideas came from outside.
"At the end of the day it wasn't a community-based project," he said, calling that kind of work a new wave of colonization.
Gearhead had never been further north in Canada than Vancouver and, being from Seattle, the Arctic for him was Alaska. But he had questions he wanted to answer about community development and when Shari sent him a job ad for Ilisaqsivik something grabbed him. Ilisaqsivik's all-volunteer board members, some of whom have been there since the beginning in 1997, find ways to make things happen while answering to the community, said Gearhead.
"They said, 'look, we can do this ourselves. We can provide the kind of programming the community needs and where we can't provide it, we can get people to come in and provide it but working for us and we're going to control it,'" he said. "I really liked the message that the answer to all of our challenges is within our own people. I said, 'I want to work for that organization.'"
Joelie Sanguya was on the Ilisaqsivik board for eight years. He remembers when Gearhead first came to Clyde River and the society was in debt.
"We cleaned that up as a board and that made a great difference," he said. "We sort of cleared the foundation, getting rid of what was not needed. From the time we paid off everything, we've gotten on with life. Jakob's done that."
Sanguya reminded Gearhead that work was important but not the most important thing.
"At the beginning, I talked to Jake, I said 'look, you are going to be working with people, so therefore on the weekend you have to get your mind away from things," he said.
Sanguya and his wife began taking the Gearhead's out on a qammutik and now both couples go dogsledding.
"It takes away the stress and when you come back you are ready. You are more eager. That's what he is doing."
Recently, Ilisaqsivik paired hunters up with youth to teach land skills. The young hunters brought back their first seal or caribou to share with the community.
"We know that the project reached its goal immediately which is something I missed in academia," said Gearhead.
He and Shari married a year ago. They have a dog team and Jake says he has a community and community development project he loves.
