Indigenous owned and operated project management consulting company expands services during pandemic
By Rick Garrick
RED ROCK INDIAN BAND — Superior Strategies Inc. has found success during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic by continuing to expand its virtual training programs and providing PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) and other supplies.
“Because we do a lot of work with communities in the remote north, we started working [prior to COVID-19] with different tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, Facebook Workplace to be able to provide different offerings at more of a cost-saving so they don’t have to travel in,” says Kirstine Baccar, office and business development manager at Superior Strategies and a Red Rock Indian Band citizen. “When COVID-19 hit in March (2020) and everything got shut down, we started pushing our projects forward through Zoom and those different tools in April. So our projects might have stopped for about two weeks, but we encouraged the communities just to confirm we could get the job done through a virtual process.”
Baccar says they also made their virtual sessions more interactive and engaging for the participants.
“We’ve had very positive responses from the programs that we’ve been delivering,” Baccar says. “I’ve delivered a few sessions of cultural awareness training and they’ve said the videos and how I get them to work through virtual training is just unbelievable.”
Baccar says Superior Strategies also offers a variety of other services, noting they were working on a strategic plan for the Red Rock Indian Band when COVID-19 hit.
“So we ended up having to move into the virtual [tools], obtaining input from community, doing community engagements, working with the advisory committee that we had established with the First Nation, to do all of our strategic planning online,” Baccar says.
Jason Thompson, president at Superior Strategies and a Red Rock Indian Band citizen, says they are still doing some in-person training for courses such as first aid and working at heights.
“Obviously we are regulated by the COVID-19 protocols and maximum number of participants per course,” Thompson says. “It’s been a learning opportunity for everybody.”
Thompson says the communities and organizations he works with have learned to adapt to conditions during the pandemic.
“I think we’re all getting prepared for when things get back to normal here, whatever normal is,” Thompson says. “We’re very fortunate that here in northwestern Ontario there is a lot of activity, lots of employment opportunities for our people. I think people are eager to get back and join the workforce and we’re happy to assist in any way we can.”
Thompson says they have also increased their market for PPE and other products, including their own private label of Warrior Workwear and Warrior sanitizing wipes, disinfecting wipes and hand sanitizers.
“We are very fortunate in that regard, so we’re moving a lot of product and working with a lot of our communities which makes us very proud,” Thompson says. “We’re trying to focus more so on sourcing from Canadian manufacturing, which sometimes is challenging but we have been very fortunate in the last while that we’ve had a lot of Canadian manufacturers reach out to us and want to do business with us.”
Thompson says they are sourcing surgical masks from the Dent-X Canada-FNProcurement Inc. PPE plant in Wiikwemkoong, which began operations in November 2020.
“We’re supplying some of our customers with those products that are manufactured on First Nation lands,” Thompson says. “So we’re very proud of that as well. That’s a big part of who we are — our long-term vision as a business is we want to also support our business brothers and sisters in manufacturing and if we can be distributors we are more than happy to do that. Even with our products, we’re working towards manufacturing on First Nations land.”