Indigenous Works’ Luminary Initiative Receives Five-Year Federal Funding to Address Innovation Gaps

For the past twenty-five years, Kelly Lendsay has served as the inaugural President and Chief Executive Officer of Indigenous Works (formerly the Aboriginal Human Resource Council). Established in 1998, the not-for-profit Indigenous organization is a response to the 1996 Report on the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples’ recommendation to increase Indigenous employment and engagement in the Canadian economy: it was rebranded as Indigenous Works (IW) in 2016. Prior to joining IW, Lendsay spent fifteen years in lifeguard and aquatic management and, in 1994, launched the first Aboriginal Business Education program in Canada at the University of Saskatchewan. He has deep roots in the Council for the Advancement of Native Development Officers (CANDO) and was a CANDO director and chair of the CANDO Education Committee in the mid-1990s. Lendsay also helped usher in the Journal of Aboriginal Economic Development and the Certified Economic Developers Program. Lendsay’s views on leadership are captured by the words of economist John Kenneth Galbraith: “All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.” Lendsay believes today’s great anxiety is Canada’s relationship with Indigenous Peoples—but he has plenty of positive examples of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples and organizations overcoming adversity, growing social and economic capital, and building a renewed relationship, thanks, in no small part, to committed leadership. As he notes, Indigenous Works is celebrating its 25th anniversary at Inclusion Works National Management Forum from October 8-10, 2024, in Nanaimo, British Columbia. It will be an opportunity to bring together people from across Canada to engage in deep management and executive learning and to celebrate its achievements over the past 25 years. Lendsay still continues to innovate. Over the past few years, he has been building support for Luminary, a new initiative that will draw on research and innovation to accelerate economic transformation, job growth, and wellbeing. For example, in December 2023, Luminary successfully obtained five years of federal funding to create a new Indigenous-led institutional approach to advance an innovation ecosystem focused on Indigenous economic priorities. The funding came from Innovation, Science and Economic Development’s new Strategic Science Fund (SSF) and Luminary was the only Indigenous-led initiative to receive this federal program funding. Overall, Luminary will support Indigenous businesses and organizations, post-secondary business schools and academic institutions, research agencies, NGOs, and private sector partners in their quest to develop Indigenous student and research talent and to foster new research and innovation collaborations that focus on Indigenous economic priorities and employ Indigenous-led approaches and models. During the 2020-21 Covid years, more than 150 Indigenous and non-Indigenous organizations signed up as Luminary Charter Partners. They co-created the Luminary Strategy though a series of regional and national online forums and incorporated eight impact themes into its strategic focus: Lendsay understands the importance of innovation. As he points out, Indigenous Peoples can innovate the same way their ancestors did before them for thousands of years. Lendsay credits the new federal SSF as a significant opportunity to create Indigenous-led approaches in Canada’s research and innovation space. “To date, the only players that could obtain institutional research and innovation program funding in Canada were universities and colleges,” he says. The SSF opens a new door for Indigenous-led strategies to advance Canada’s research and innovation agenda. While there has been considerable research activity in the social sciences, law, education, and health, the same is not true for Indigenous business and economics. This is why Luminary will focus on business schools and Canada’s research community and …