Our approach

Firelight endeavours to ensure a transfer of skills and knowledge during our work with communities. We also aim to integrate community members into our teams, whether they be focused on research, mapping, policy, or negotiations, so that community members gain skills and feel ownership of our work.

Training courses

Firelight also provides training courses for Indigenous communities, to help enhance their capacity in research, policy development and negotiation:

• Hands-on direct-to-digital mapping and data management training in individual communities and for larger groups
• Workshops on running TUS interviews, working with community researchers on methods and techniques
• Training sessions on how to use the Impact and Benefit Agreement Community Toolkit – a key resource for First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities in Canada considering impact and benefit agreements, specifically those with mining companies
• Orientation sessions on federal/provincial EA processes, to help communities understand how they can more effectively participate and effect change
• Training on monitoring and managing socioeconomic effects, examining methods for monitoring impacts from industrial development
• Training on the development of community-led environmental monitoring programs that respect community protocols for looking after the land, water, animals and plants
• Larger-scale Indigenous Mapping Workshops co-hosted by Firelight, during which we deliver technical training on Google mapping tools so that participants can collect, manage, share and publish their own map data