Joe, CORCAN Instructor
Joe, an instructor at an Indigenous healing lodge for women, who helps residents learn trades such as carpentry and construction during their time there so that they have skills to help them find jobs and be successful when returning to the community.
Video transcript
My name is Joe Daniel. I'm a CORCAN Supervisor and I work here at Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge.
We teach the residents how to work with different construction equipment, tools, basic knowledge, showing them the ins and outs of construction and just different techniques of maintaining and building practices.
We do various different things like you can see around the shop here, we've got some picnic tables, coffee tables and stuff that we've put together. We've also done some renovations for the site. We’ve replaced all the flooring in the living units and painted the living units, and we also replaced all the electrical fixtures in the living units. We get through a process and then, okay, now we can analyze what we did. How can we cut time here? How can we do improvements here?
The changes in the girls is phenomenal. They come in, scared to even touch a circular saw. Watching them move beyond their own insecurities of just life in general. Every story is different. Every one of them has a different healing process that we all need to go through as everybody else. Getting to know the residents individually and being able to, you know, help them through their process to a normal life. However I can do that, that's what I find the most rewarding, watching them move beyond and have success.