At Hammarskjold High School in Thunder Bay, an Indigenous skilled trades training program is producing modular homes for a Matawa First Nations community. Students learn how to read blueprints, operate power tools, and identify building materials while they put together the modular homes. The first home completed by the school will be shipped to the community this summer; the second home is currently under construction. “If the trades are a career that they want to pursue, we’ll be there for them,” said Matawa First Nations CEO David Paul Achneepineskum. “What we find is when the students learn from these kinds of experience, they go back to their communities and they become leaders in terms of getting involved and getting things done, which is what the communities need.”
