Building Relationships Rooted in RECIPROCITY

As discussed in part one of our blog series, Fostering Indigenous Partnerships: UBC Ventures' Journey Towards Truth & Reconciliation, entrepreneurship@UBC’s ventures and partners highlighted the importance of building relationships rooted in reciprocity as one of the key themes to supporting Indigenous partnerships and further promoting Truth & Reconciliation across UBC, with the support of Discovery Foundation.

When working with Indigenous communities, recognizing that relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples must be based on mutual respect, understanding, and benefit is the critical first step in building a reciprocal relationship.¹ These needs are not purely product or outcome-based, but tend to be far more rooted in the process itself. Building this relationship means ensuring that there are First Nations voices in the collaboration from start to finish, which is never an overnight process. 

Reciprocity as a process means giving and receiving in equal measure and recognizing the importance of Indigenous knowledge and culture in shaping project goals. By practising reciprocity, non-Indigenous people can build stronger relationships with Indigenous peoples and communities.

One of the roundtable participants was Dr. Madjid Mohseni from Community Circle, an organization focused on addressing unique and complex water health and economic challenges in Indigenous and rural communities. Community Circle evolved by shifting focus on what communities need rather than what we thought they ought to need, or worse still, what we felt we can provide them.² Reciprocal relationships are critical in identifying these community needs, and as Dr. Mohseni puts it, 

“If you want to work with any client collaboratively, you need to have the patience to build relationships. Whether it's for entrepreneurs or researchers who have strict timelines due to the grants’ lifecycle, or the students’ need to graduate…Time needs to be dedicated to this. For Community Circle, even though we started as university researchers, it still took 2-3 years to build the relationship with our community partners.” 

Building effective relationships lies in developing trust with your partner Nation, which is not handed out easily. The key to understanding why trust is not readily given lies in the history of Indigenous relations in Canada. It is next to impossible to respectfully and effectively engage with an Indigenous community without knowledge of their history.³ Key principles to consider in ensuring equitable and inclusive engagement with an Indigenous partner include being respectful, engaging early, communicating transparently, listening, and adaptability.

What should you avoid doing?

• Not spending or allowing enough time for engagement and relationship-building
• Not showing up (leaders in your organization need to prioritize the meetings with the communities)
• Showing up without invitation and without prior understanding and knowledge about the community
• Going with a solution in mind, before understanding the problem

Especially with regards to showing up and having a presence in the relationship, make sure that you engage with the broader community and not the leadership.  And, when the Chief is involved, ensure that your head of organization, such as CEO or Principal Investigator is present, especially in the early stages. For your venture team, this collaboration may be the primary focus, but First Nation communities have so many priorities they are working on, involving your entire team during the time they can give you is a critical sign of respect and care for the partnership.

Many founders from entrepreneurship@UBC have come from a research background, and as is the natural practice in the Western scientific method, there is frequently a mindset of having a prior solution in mind when approaching a problem. However, this assumes that you have a full and rich understanding of the problem to begin with. You must educate yourself on your partner community before working with them by doing things such as searching their website, but this is still not an all-encompassing view of the group you are working with and their challenges. Ensure that you are actively listening to the community about their problems before jumping into providing what you believe is an effective solution, and again any solution must be developed collaboratively. 

Early-stage startups must commit significant time, resources, and effort to build mutually beneficial relationships, at too early of a stage this level of dedication may not be feasible due to limited capacity or other constraints. Partnering with Indigenous communities is something that should be approached with a long-term understanding of the commitment and work necessary to build and maintain reciprocal relationships. Putting entrepreneurial gain ahead of mutual purpose and benefit will only lead to miscommunications and misalignment of objectives in what can become social and economic prosperity for the communities we serve.

Overall, the priority of establishing a relationship based on trust, allyship, and mutual respect, must be a clear objective at the outset of community engagement. Commercial priorities must be mutually agreed upon. To find resources on best practices in partnerships and communications see here.

 _{1 https://pdce.educ.ubc.ca/values/}

_{2 Community Circle on Scaling Business Innovation for Humanity Slides (Provided by Dr. Mohseni)}

_{3 https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/3-rs-of-an-effective-indigenous-pre-engagement-strategy}