By: Danielle Dufour
The Yorkton area was without a friendship centre since 2018, until now. The Yorkton Indigenous Friendship Centre was incorporated two years ago and got accepted by the national association.
As there is no physical building for the centre, they rent two offices in Yorkton and use community space all over town to run their programs.
“We’ve been running programs out of partnership spaces around Yorkton almost every single day since then,” said Executive Director Mary Culbertson. “We have a good team and we’re just excited about building the community again.”
The friendship centre now has a staff of four consisting of a youth coordinator, a women’s network coordinator, a program support finance worker, and the executive director.
“We’re having a youth drumming group … we have men’s networking nights on Tuesday, and that’s a men’s group Donavon Crow Buffalo stepped up to help with,” said Culbertson.
The Friendship Centre will be hosting a Women’s Health Matters conference on March 17th and 18th and a Men’s Health Matters conference on March 26th and 27th.
“Tonight, we’re having Kookum bag making and also having some northern fish,” said Culbertson.
“One of our staff members is from Sucker River, and she brought down some meat and fish for tonight’s event, and she made chowder, and everyone is just loving it,” said Culbertson. “We had wild rice and moose meat for lunch … we have an excellent team.”
The centre has been offering workshops on grief and healing with talking circles. The grief workshops run every second Wednesday.
“Loving people with addictions, workshop support group for families, the grief workshops, especially around community responsiveness, when something happens in our communities, there is that need to respond,” said Culbertson.
The workshops are well attended because the centre offers them at different times.
“We try to balance evening, weekend, and daytime programming,” said Culbertson. “The people who work during the day, go to school, etc., you know, they need to get out too.”
Elders from surrounding communities provide support and help train counsellors who facilitate talking circles.
Recently the centre held an Indigenous market at the St. Andrews Church.
The centre also has an LGBTQ spirit support and community group.
“We have many people from surrounding communities coming … our mission is to make sure that we have safe spaces for our vulnerable populations so they feel safe,” said Culbertson. “Everything we do is in the name of bringing community together and healing this generation and the next, trying to build a better future for everybody.”