Within the community of Wemindji, we strive to serve our community by providing leadership and outstanding services that maintain and enhance the quality of life for our people of today and tomorrow.
Investing both within our community and outside has certainly benefited in producing businesses, jobs and more importantly ensuring the best possible quality of life. By making economic development a more widely recognized integral part of our community's development and not as an optional add-on to our growth plans to potentially achieve sustainable self-sufficiency.
A Role Player
Tawich Development Corporation has played and is still playing an important role in the part of keeping our local economy a little more self-reliant. One of the current local initiatives we have taken is that we are creating an opportunity for entrepreneurs to take over businesses in which the development corporation currently owns within the community and also restructuring the company's operations and management. The company also has on-going investments outside the community in which varies from ground transportation companies (KEPA Group in which consist of KEPA itself providing transportation of goods for the northern regions, Transport Legault, focused on the southern regions and Eeyou Transport in which transports fuel and oil also within the northern region), to aerial flight companies (Air Wemindji, a bush flight service for tourism, outfitting and mining and exploration activities, as well as Whapchiwem Helicopters servicing a different mode of transportation for the main company Air Wemindji) as well as a wholesale petroleum company also focused on servicing the northern region (Bessum).Strategic Planning
As to past conferences, workshops, seminars and local community meetings, the economic development department has taken the initiative to develop a Strategic Economic Development Plan for the community. As mentioned, the strategy is needed as part of enhancing community quality of life. We together as a community will utilize all of our current resource people and material in order to maximize the productiveness and efficiency of the document that is to be developed within the next year. On-going studies such as the development corporation's restructuring, the local governance framework, as well as others are to be taken into account when establishing the final finished working model for our local economic development strategy.Services
Within the community, we offer a wide range of services, such as a service station that serves gas, oil, propane and much more, a motel with 12 modern rooms and 10 dormitory rooms for extended stays, 3 local restaurants, an excellent training and fitness facility, policing, a highly competitive fire fighting team, ambulance services, a wellness center as part of our social development initiatives, an arena, a community/banquet hall, a clinic, a mini-mall/plaza, that offers banking facilities, a community store, restaurant, a retail store for clothing, hardware, a post office, a coffee shop, as well as an amusement center and much more.Tourism, mining and hydro are some of the key economic industry initiatives that have been developed and further explored and updated within our Cree Nation community. More services locally are also in the planning and development stages such as housing, business start-ups, infrastructure within the community are just some of the developmental activities that are on-going.