Our leadership directives are to build economic sustainability, keep our community moving, build our capacity, stay within our budgets, and finish our projects. As we go through our directives, we realize that communication amongst our senior staff needs to be stepped up. We need to remember our reporting coordination, and to remember that decisions we make; we make together right or wrong. Our Leadership and the senior staff realize that we are venturing into territory that is unfamiliar and familiar at the same time. It is easy to become overwhelmed, scared, and excited as we take our community and our Leadership’s directives into a prosperous future; we need to be courageous, persevere, and believe that we can do it.

As we are building and implementing the directives from the leadership, operation of the band office must continue. We need to continue to plan for events and try to look after the needs of our community members through operation of basic programming. December is a busy month and events in January must be prepared for as well. We need to do these things simultaneously by building our capacity, by communicating our directions effectively and not to overwork ourselves.

Over the years, leadership realized there was a communication gap with their membership and made significant efforts to improve in this area. As a result of this recognition and as a compliment to the various membership meetings, the leadership increased and focused on other avenues of communications. These include publications of a monthly newsletter, website, brochures and calendars. In addition, the leadership has hosted community events that also reflect our community plans, projects, and initiatives. The public meetings, publications and events have proved to increase the membership’s awareness of their community and their leadership’s accountability to them as demonstrated in the membership’s comments and questions during a recent community meeting. The questions and comments were well thought out and specific to the agenda items which demonstrated the memberships concern and provided valuable input to their government. Leadership is encouraged by their communities trust in them to have an open discussion with engaging comments and questions about their community thus demonstrating a marked improvement in their communication gap of years past.

There are programs and staff that need to be thanked such as the NNDAP Department for their addictions awareness week and the H1N1 vaccinations by the nursing staff. Thank you to the community members who received their H1N1 and regular flu vaccination; however, we are not out of the woods yet as there are still people getting sick and it may not be the H1N1 but another strain. So keep yourself healthy, get lots of sleep, keep yourselves stress free, and eat healthy. As always, maintain balance in everything.

As you can see and hear communication is the key to our success and learning, so read for your goo-kum, mo-shoom, children, and yourselves! Newsletters can be obtained at the reception desk usually around the first week of the month. Thank you to the editor and to those who submit to the newsletter!

Merry Christmas to Everyone!

Respectfully, Beatrice Carpentier, O’Chiese Band Manager