No Enterprise jamboree in 2025 as hamlet concentrates on cleanup

In 2024, Enterprise’s annual jamboree was a chance for a defiant community to come together in the face of a disastrous wildfire the year before.

In 2025, there’ll be no such gathering. The jamboree isn’t going ahead this month.

What changed? Evellyn Coleman, who was central to making the last jamboree happen, said “a whole bunch of stuff has transpired” since.

From 2024: Enterprise’s jamboree in pictures

The intervening year brought the replacement of the hamlet’s council with a territorially appointed administrator after political upheaval led the GNWT to conclude there were too many “governance, financial, and operational challenges.”

Multiple councillors had already resigned prior to that, a new mayor lasted just four months in the post and Enterprise’s senior administrator left the role.

“The SAO has left. A lot of the staff left. Then council was dissolved. To do events, you need some council support,” said Coleman.

“The administrator came two months ago. I don’t think there would have been time. You need to start planning in probably January, February, right? That didn’t happen.”

Coleman has stepped back for personal reasons – “it’s a lot of work and I’m not a young chicken any more” – but doesn’t harbour any ill will about the absence of a jamboree this year. To her, it’s one of those things, and the jamboree will return.

“I feel in my heart it will come back. I think there’s enough will, inside and outside of the community, to have it come back. It’s just circumstance right now,” she said on Friday.

“The jamboree is something that brings the community together and it brings people in the South Slave together, it’s well attended. People are very heartbroken it’s not happening, and I understand that, but I wouldn’t go and blame one person.”

Grant Hood is the GNWT-appointed administrator who took over in May.

Hood, a former senior administrator in Inuvik, said Enterprise is struggling with “resource issues from a staffing point of view” that would have to be figured out before the hamlet could help run a major event.

“One of the big things a lot of people want is just getting the place cleaned up, because it still has a ways to go on that,” said Hood, referring to work that continues to recover from 2023’s wildfire, which destroyed the majority of the community. Enterprise had been home to around 100 people at the time.

“People are concentrated on that,” Hood said.

“We’re trying to get the foundation of the community solid operations-wise, so they can go forward with stuff like this [the jamboree] and we can support them in any way that we can.”