Entrepreneurship training aims to help bring jobs to Sagamok First Nation

A handful of new businesses could soon be opening their doors in a northern Ontario First Nation community.

Seventeen people from the Sagamok First Nation, located approximately 120 kilometres southwest of Sudbury recently received entrepreneurship training from Canadore College.

Instructor Charles Gagnon told CBC News his students have ambitious plans.

"For example, a grocery store," he said, adding that "Sagamok is just outside of Massey and there's not even a grocery store in Massey."

"We're looking at things like a laundromat, a taxi service. There's absolutely no taxi service there."

Officials at the college said the training came in the form of a 13 week-long program where participants attended classes three days a week strategy aimed at helping students support their family obligations.

"This program is comprehensive and intensive," Judy Manitowabi, a manager at Canadore College's First Peoples' Centre, was quoted as saying in a press release.

"Students were led through the demanding task of preparing a business plan, which included explaining their entrepreneurial idea, completing an environmental and competitive scan, establishing a strategy, conducting risk analysis, identifying funding requirements and more."

Training expected to make Sagamok more self-sufficient

Instilling entrepreneurial skills in a number of community members who want to take them back to Sagamok will only help the community move forward, Gagnon said.

"The fact that people will have these services within their community, close by, that's going to provide a much better quality of life than what they have right now," he said.

Gagnon, a former Tembec vice-president and retired manager of community relations at Canadore, estimated the first new business will open within the next two months.

In total, he said he expects seven new businesses to open within five years.