The Quesnel Tillicum Society/Native Friendship Centre will be running a Wildfire Firefighter program.
Executive Director Tony Goulet says it will be a 6 week program beginning on March 1st…
“We’re going to train 20 indigenous youth, or 20 indigenous people in fire fighting, give them all the skills, all the equipment, everything that they need, and at the end of the program we’re hoping that Quesnel Tillicum Society will have a crew ready to go out and fight forest fires.”
Goulet says they are working with the senior governments to make sure that they are registered and can bid on forest fighting contracts.
He says they received more than 300 thousand dollars in funding in the form of a Community Workforce Response Grant, a federal program that is run through an agreement with the province.
Goulet says the training will be done in a couple of places.
“Some of it will be done through the College.  We’re hoping to include some indigenous pieces in there, and some indigenous awareness and things like that, but most of the certificates will be done through the college, and the Tillicum Society will be using our space, using our hall to run some of that training.”
Goulet says registration will be done on-line…
“We’ve created an application where you have to go on-line just because we want to make sure that we have a commitment from people.  If we’re going to spend that much money on training, we want to make sure we have a strong commitment from the individuals.”
The link is https://3qzz7khkw3r.typeform.com/to/P05CDt19
Goulet says they hope to have flexibility in when the training will take place, possibly with some in the evening and some during the day.
The criteria, according to the news release, is that you must be at least 15 years of age, be unemployed, or underemployed.