Sophie Tremblay

Title/Position: Senior Policy Advisor

Company: Native Woman’s Association of Canada (NWAC)

With a master's degree in communications, as a Senior Policy Advisor at the Native Woman’s Association of Canada (NWAC), Sophie Tremblay is combining her Métis heritage with her social-innovation knowledge. This has put her on the ground, connecting with Indigenous communities’ coast to coast to coast, working to address the pressing human needs confronting Canada at its margins. With her years of experience in the halls of Parliament, working with small-businesses and entrepreneurs, with high-tech and small farms, in both the English and French speaking worlds, and now in daily engagement with all three of our Native peoples, her working perspective embraces a wide spectrum of Canada’s challenges, strengths, and possibilities. She is known as an efficient and reliable creative senior professional with more than 20 years of progressive leadership in capacity building, socio-economic/socio-technologic innovation, organizational adaptation and social learning. Digital fabrication machines like 3D printers, available in Fab Labs (among other places), are opening new opportunities, much like the personal computer and Internet did previously. Since 2013, she’s been among those who started to bring it into our schools and public infrastructures. Now, there are nearly 400 locations with this sociotechnology, generating innovation in education, entrepreneurship, community development. She is currently working to bring it to Indigenous communities across Canada. If her life has a recurrent theme, it’s the drive to reduce waste; whether it’s human, material, natural. This means pushing the boundaries of opportunity so that all can contribute and benefit; it means making more of the shared commons and opening the flow of information; it means restructuring our social bonds to find our shared purposes.  And, it means sustainable, innovative, development: of land, human capital, and the ecosystem it supports.