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Woven into the fabric of the sustainable plan is Inuit
(phrase in Inuktitut), which basically here in Iqaluit
means the knowledge, the traditional values.
Those are all incorporated into the plan.
Inuit (same Inuktitut phrase) are the survival skills,
the knowledge of how we use the land,
how we grow up to be adults...
We're highly over-consulted.
People tuned out and said "I'm not interested."
You know, all these plans had been done in the past and
nothing has actually been done.
I asked them, "Would you come to an open house?"
and they said, "no".
And they said, "Well, I would come to a meeting if it was
multi-day, drop in, and fun."
And essentially we created what they had asked for.
We collated 300 documents written about Iqaluit
in the past ten years.
We've had 500 people actively participate in the process.
There were many more people involved in terms
of community actions.
There were over 100 municipal actions and over 100 community
actions, as well.
Concrete, manageable, practical actions that have
a lot of heart.
Inuit have always been very sustainable this way to survive
the harsh environment that we have up here.
How have they sustained themselves
is what we need to understand.
Iqaluit in a sense is like the New York of the North,
a diverse group of people here from all over the world,
all over the Territory.
We got the funding from the Green Municipal Fund and that
helped us to actually bring out community together,
have community dialogue.
To watch and to listen and record all the information
that the elders of the community provided.
We wrote everything down verbatim and shared
that with our community.
You can put it into anything, whether it be community
development, whether it be economic development.
it's still what people are thinking of.
It takes a community to care for a community and a lot of times
I don't think that we even have to go outside.
We are a neighborhood.
We're aspiring and on the same page.