Overview of Project Proposal:
(Submitted January 15, 2008) - The proposal is for a request to The Government of Canada Program for IPY. The Call for Proposals invited Canadian organizations to submit proposals for funding for training, communications and outreach projects in conjunction with International Polar Year. This was the primary Call for Proposals for training, communications and outreach under the Government of Canada Program for IPY. A total of $5 million in funding is available. Projects could seek up to three years of funding and the total value of individual awards may be up to $600,000. This Call for Proposals closed on January 15, 2008.

Proposal Summary:
Development is a fundamental element in a rapidly evolving circumpolar North. Development alone, however, cannot ensure the well-being of Northern communities. What is required is development that is economically, socially and environmentally sustainable. To achieve this goal, development must be grounded on awareness and respect for the insights, traditional knowledge, cultural imperatives and rights of Northern Aboriginal and the non-Aboriginal communities. Equally, attracting the development so necessary to the creation and maintenance of viable communities in the North requires a shared and realistic appreciation of the economic imperatives that ground and attract economically viable and socially responsible development.

As part of the IPY initiative, we are proposing to develop tools, and encourage dialogue using those tools, to assist Northern Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities and potential private and public sector partners to share, apply and augment the wealth of existing knowledge required for socially responsible development, access to which is currently restricted by cultural, geographic, linguistic and economic barriers.

Our goal is to meet the objectives of the Canadian Government IPY Program by facilitating shared understandings of differing values, needs, expectations, knowledge and experience that can lay the foundations for “joint visioning” of the design and implementation of development in the North. Our project is designed to ensure that those understandings are shared across the Canadian North through dialogue assisted by advanced communication technologies. Finally we propose to support access to the understandings generated by that dialogue to the Canadian South and more widely to the international community.