Highlighting The Northern Manitoba Food, Culture, and Community Collaborative

Centering community priorities to reclaim culture and food sovereignty

Current contribution: 2022-2025
$500,000

Previous funding: 2013-2022

$725,000

An icon of two people facing each other.

Funding strategy

Reconciliation – Indigenous-led collaborative funding projects

With funds pooled from multiple partners, including McConnell, NMFCCC provides modest grants to support community-led food and cultural projects across northern Manitoba. It also enables the sharing of learnings between communities and to broader audiences.

The Northern Manitoba Food, Culture, and Community Collaborative (NMFCCC) is an innovative group composed of northern communities, eight northern advisors, and 13 funders working to reclaim food systems, culture and food sovereignty. Through improved access to culturally appropriate foods and the development of resilient local economies, NMFCCC is fostering healthier, stronger communities in northern Manitoba.

Responding to the need for greater and more flexible funding in the North, NMFCCC pools and redistributes contributions from multiple funders as grants to northern Indigenous communities. Since their pilot in 2013, the collective has disbursed nearly $4.5 million to 200 community-led projects that enhance food security and/or traditional culture in northern Manitoba. Further, over 50 communities in the province have been supported through granting, story sharing funds, and North-to-North events.

NMFCCC’s collaborative funding model places community priorities at the fore, shifting power to local leadership. For example, since 2013 NFMCCC has provided funding and support to the Ithinto Mechisowin Program (IMP) which was created by the O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation as a way to improve community food security through traditional food ways. Meaning “food from the land,” the IMP trains youth to harvest wild food and medicine, and to prepare, preserve and cook those ingredients. Additionally, the program shares the harvested food with 400 people each month, contributing to positive physical and mental health impacts. The IMP offices have also become a community space for Elders, youth, and food champions, contributing to the overall wellbeing of the community.

NMFCCC has evolved to better serve communities with each passing year.

“The nature of our work is relational. We spend time getting to know people in community, understanding what works and what doesn’t so we can be better helpers,” says Kristy Anderson, NMFCCC Team Member. “We are proud to work together in service of Northern communities, and we hope to continue to do so as long as partnership is sought.”

A young girl wearing a blue lifejacket, collecting rocks on a beach in a blue bucket.

Thank you to the Northern Manitoba Food, Culture, and Community Collaborative, the Ithinto Mechisowin Program, the Grow North program, and the War Lake First Nation for the images used on this page andother pages in this report. On this page: Elders fileting fish for Ithinto Mechisowin Program and youth collecting seagull eggs for Ithinto Mechisowin Program. On the previous page: Michelle Brandon smoking meat during the 2019 Traditional Teachings and Traditional Foods Gathering in War Lake First Nation. On the Contributions and Partners page: Howard Dumas and Lori Dysart show off the lettuce production at Grow North.

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