Aroland working to improve band policies

Aroland First Nation staff recently met in Thunder Bay to streamline band processes to improve band office operations for community members.
“We’re here to get together and talk about some of our administration policies,” said Mark Bell, Aroland’s economic development officer. “We’re looking at streamlining some of our processes and try to make our band office run a lot smoother.”
All of the community’s band staff, including band councilors and employees working on water issues, economic development and health, met on Nov. 29.
“The purpose of this is to discuss our current policy,” said Aroland Councillor Robinson Meshake, who is also the community’s employment counsellor. “Our current policy was last revised in 2002, so we are long overdue.”
Meshake said the band has been researching different types of policies, ranging in types of work, types of holidays for employees, codes of ethics, grievance procedures and development of a mission statement.
“We want to bridge that employer-employee relationship, so therefore we want to create a document that’s going to be concrete for our staff to utilize as well as (for) resource sharing with other First Nations who wish to seek help within that policy development,” Meshake said. “So we’re going to be discussing the parameters, discussing the who, the what, the where, the when and the why in terms of policy development.”
Meshake said the current policy is about 32 pages long while typical policies range from 50-75 pages in length.
“So we’re hoping to develop a policy that targets everything from A to Z,” Meshake said. “We have a draft financial policy which will be discussed today as well as a governance policy.”
Meshake said the governance policy would focus on distinguishing politics and business separately.
“We’ll focus on politics first, business later,” he said.