The shortlist of projects competing for $3.7 million in 2024 Arctic Inspiration Prize funding has been released.
A bid to create a pan-territorial youth strategy is among the projects hoping to win the top prize of $1 million.
That’s up against projects that promise to build an alternative Nunavut education stream, grow an Inuit cultural centre in Labrador, hold knowledge-sharing camps inspired by beluga hunting in Nunavik, and expand the Inuit TV and film industry.
In the $500,000 category, Fort Smith’s Aurora Heat is proposing a project to “address the multi-faceted challenges faced by many employees” at the company, which makes beaver-fur products.
“With a focus on addressing the root causes of employment instability, food insecurity and loss of Indigenous cultural connections, they aim to create an innovative and healing way of work on the company’s new property,” a summary of the project reads.
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Other projects in that category seek to offer recovery and wellness programming in Yukon, teach boys and young men to fish for Arctic char in Nunavut, hold reunions for people evicted from their homes in Nunatsiavut’s Hebron and Nutak in the 1950s, and grow a Yukon therapeutic farm school. There’s also a pan-northern bid from literacy councils to “change the face of northern learning practices” with the help of Elders and other specialists.
Finalists for the youth prize, worth $100,000, include a pan-northern project to engage youth in local food production.
Others in the category include a project using video to revitalize Inuktut dialects, a proposal to hold a Yukon youth theatre festival, and a project to “provide employment and skill-building opportunities for young Inuit mothers and women.”
Winners will be announced in Whitehorse on May 7.
