Who we are
Splatsin Tsm7aksaltn Teaching Centre Society is located in the Interior region of British Columbia and serves as an early childhood education hub dedicated to serving the Splatsin and surrounding communities. The centre employs a team of qualified Infant Toddler Educators, Early Childhood Educators, Assistants, and contractors, many of whom are local. Cultural preservation is a key focus, with ongoing efforts to record and teach language supported by local partners like the Salmon Arm Rotary Club. The centre prioritizes safety and environmental responsibility, operating from an eco-friendly facility. It also places a strong emphasis on workforce development, offering training and practicum placements for early childhood education students through partnerships with institutions like UBC Okanagan, Okanagan College, and Vancouver Community College.
Our Work with SPIRIT
SPIRIT in Splatsin is creating space for our participants to engage with one another and have a deeper extension into our community to enrich the teachings from family to family about traditional practices. Family Spirit has provided space for those whom do not have connection with Splatsin peoples to gain knowledge sharing of the ways of Splatsin as to share with their babies and begin to instill these ways from birth and infancy throughout their development and to carry on throughout their lives. Splatsin Family Spirit is working with land knowledge and language preservation and offering these teachings to the participants of the Family Spirit Project as a way to harness this information and ensure that it continues to be passed down as it is meant to.
What SPIRIT means to us
SPIRIT has allowed our team to create a new pathway through our AIDP (Aboriginal Infant Development Program) to enrich the lives of our participants allowing resources for gathering for traditional practices, medicines and land knowledge. It has enhanced our program by providing a richness of Splatsin culture, that previously had a lot of room for growth as the main focus was just the development of the child. Funding from LEGO for Family Spirit has created a larger network or resources within the community and time to be able for the home visitor to ensure that all needed resources and available funds to expecting families and families with young children are receiving everything possible. Our participants have ample access to home visits that ensure that they can gather knowledge from a group of elders that the home visitor from Family Spirit has the pleasure and gift to work alongside. Language is being shared with participants in a way that had been missing from the community prior to this project enhancing Splatsin Tsm7aksaltn AIDP.
The Global Spirit has motivated our team in a deep rooted way. The passion that was palpable within the walls of every space that we shared has truly recharged Splatsin (which was already bursting with passion) in a way that has brought forth even more ways to connect to earth, community and our elders.
The engagement with the different regions has allowed new perspectives and to view new ways that the roots can further spread within the project, such as how Family Spirit participant group sessions can provide a variety of benefits for the home visitor as well as all of the participants through knowledge sharing.
There is a new and wide network of outreach for information and to brainstorm how to further enrich this project as a result of the Global Gathering.
The "play" and how LEGO wants to see parenting, teaching, nurturing and play interweave in a play space has seeded into my brain to explore our cultural yard and spaces within the Splatsin Community and further search for ways to model this vision with the participants and ensure that when our play space has reached its fruition, it will be a natural segue from Family Spirit visits into the play space for teachings.