THUNDER BAY – Over the course of two decades, the growth of the First Nations Housing Conference is unmistakable.
The First Nations Housing Community hosted the 20th annual event on Wednesday.
Jonathan Gregg, member of the First Nations Housing Committee, said it’s hard to miss the growth he’s seen over the years.
“Over the 20 years, one of the things we have had is that just the education and awareness of what housing means to First Nations,” he said.
“Like rent collection, we have communities now that had zero rent 20 years ago, where they're almost at 90 per cent, or 96 per cent [in] one community, which is a huge thing,”
The First Nations Housing Conference’s mission is dedicated to sharing best practices for First Nations housing development and Gregg said that he’s proud to be able to help communities from so many different places.
“A lot of people have been coming here for 20 years and it's the training and the information and the technical information that we've been providing has been helping our communities in Ontario and now across Canada,“ he said.
“Now we have a lot of First Nations from different parts of Canada that have come, I think we even have one from overseas coming to our conference now so it's great and one of the things we would like to do is to share this knowledge and we want to talk about maybe delivering this type of information across Canada because we get great feedback from our participants and people that come here.”
Hundreds of people were in attendance and Gregg said he’s appreciative of the event’s success during its 20th anniversary
“I would just like to say thank you to all our sponsors, our government, our private sector sponsors, and just for all the people that come out and just want a network,” he said.
“And one thing we all know that we've been under this pandemic, it just feels good to see everybody and not through a Zoom, so that's great and I just again thank you everyone for coming out.”
