Leadership Design Is a Systems Issue

Why Indigenous-Led Governance Cannot Be an Afterthought

As Increased ACCESS and its Indigenous SPCA project have become more visible, people have asked thoughtful and appropriate questions about how decisions are made, how leadership is structured, and what “Indigenous-led” means in practice. These questions matter not because of optics, but because leadership design determines whether systems actually function differently from the ones they are meant to replace.

This post is intended to offer clarity.

Increased ACCESS did not emerge as a branding exercise or as a programmatic extension of existing animal welfare models. It grew out of post-COVID research and long-standing partnerships with Indigenous communities, including research directed by Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, that made a structural pattern impossible to ignore.

Indigenous communities are routinely expected to manage animal-related public health and safety risks while remaining dependent on outside service providers such as SPCAs, visiting veterinary teams, and short-term charitable interventions. At the same time, Indigenous voices have been largely absent from federal and provincial animal-related funding and policy decision-making, even though those decisions directly shape health, safety, and land use in Indigenous communities.

The result is a persistent mismatch. Responsibility is placed on communities, while authority, resources, and agenda-setting power largely remain elsewhere.

That work also surfaced a second reality. Large, urban SPCAs have become dominant institutional actors in the animal care landscape. Their scale, branding power, and fundraising reach shape public narratives, funding flows, and policy influence that impact public health and safety. Yet those institutions were not designed around Indigenous governance, rural and remote realities, or long-term prevention.

Increased ACCESS launched its Indigenous SPCA initiative as an alternative to these dominant forces. Not to compete on scale, but to be structurally different. 

Being structurally different required starting with governance, not programming. Increased ACCESS’ membership consists of Indigenous Nations, and much of its strategic direction has been shaped through formal and informal conversations with Indigenous community members over more than a decade of shared work. Our founding Board members were recruited based on trust, lived experience, and each member’s relationship to animals, governance, and Indigenous communities. 

Once formed, that Indigenous-governed Board gave their non-Indigenous, interim Executive Director a clear mandate to build what had been missing: the institutional, financial, and policy foundations required to sustainably support an Indigenous-led effort to increase the access that Indigenous communities have to animal-related public health and safety services, infrastructure and resources. That mandate flows from Indigenous governance, not the individual holding the role.

Within Indigenous philanthropic spaces, including frameworks such as those used by The Circle, Increased ACCESS meets the criteria used to distinguish Indigenous-led organizations. But governance structure alone does not produce legitimacy. Its legitimacy rests equally on where it came from, who it is accountable to, and how decisions are shaped through ongoing relationships with Indigenous communities.

“Indigenous-led” cannot mean simply placing Indigenous staff into roles that remain structurally constrained. It means designing leadership roles that carry real authority, accountability, and legitimacy within Indigenous governance systems.

This distinction matters in practice. In recent conversations with national funders, we have been encouraged to demonstrate Indigeneity through staffing alone, even while those same institutions acknowledge how difficult it is to recruit Indigenous leaders with the lived experience, technical expertise, and governance legitimacy this work requires. The tension is not about intent. It is about confusing representation with readiness, and optics with infrastructure. We will not resolve that tension by placing individuals into roles that are structurally set up to fail.

Our work is built on the understanding that representation, trust, and technical expertise serve different functions and cannot substitute for one another. The person leading this work must be able to operate within Indigenous governance spaces, uphold community accountability, and represent the project in Indigenous-led forums in ways that are culturally grounded and politically legitimate.

For that reason, Increased ACCESS and Indigenous SPCA are designed to be Indigenous-led, not merely Indigenous-staffed.

Much of the public writing associated with Increased ACCESS has focused on systems analysis. This reflects the organization’s current role. It has been concerned with how harm is framed, how responsibility is assigned, how funding flows, and why well-intentioned interventions repeatedly fail to produce durable change.

This work is not about speaking for communities. It is about naming institutional failures that communities have been forced to navigate, often without adequate authority or support, and about creating the conditions required for those failures to be addressed differently.

This approach has been shaped by the principle of Two-Eyed Seeing, articulated by Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall, which calls for holding Indigenous knowledge systems and Western systems together without one subsuming the other.

In practical terms, this means Indigenous governance defines priorities and outcomes, while Increased ACCESS navigates the external systems that currently control funding and regulation.

Bridging those systems is not neutral work. It carries real risk, particularly when authority, accountability, and resources are misaligned. Part of the role of Increased ACCESS has been to hold that risk temporarily while building pathways that allow leadership to be resourced, compensated, and supported in ways that are sustainable.

There is a practical reality often overlooked in conversations about leadership transition. Responsibility for complex, high-risk systems cannot be handed to an individual before the institutional and financial infrastructure needed to support that role is in place. Doing so does not create equity or accountability. It simply transfers risk onto a person and recreates the very conditions that systems change is meant to address.

For this reason, Increased ACCESS has focused on building the institutional and financial foundations required to support long-term, Indigenous-led systems change in community animal management. This work is necessarily slow. It requires credibility, evidence, and durable relationships across government, philanthropy, and community.

But it is also what makes meaningful leadership transition possible.

From the outset, Increased ACCESS has sought to recruit Indigenous leadership into roles with real authority across its work. Efforts to hire Indigenous managers, including for the Indigenous SPCA initiative, have been ongoing since the organization’s earliest days. What has been required first is the institutional and financial infrastructure capable of supporting leadership roles that are durable, accountable, and not exposed to unmanaged risk.

As those foundations now take shape, Indigenous leadership will be hired to guide the Indigenous SPCA work, with authority over program direction, partnerships, and representation. This is a leadership role, not a delivery position.

As systems stabilize and sustainable revenue is secured, leadership of Increased ACCESS will also evolve. Either Indigenous SPCA leadership will assume the Executive Director role, or a separate Indigenous Executive Director will be hired to lead the organization as a whole. These decisions will be made under Indigenous governance and guided by the needs of the work, not by personalities or titles.

Naming leadership design and transition publicly is not about reassurance. It is about aligning expectations, inviting the right people into the work, and avoiding the quiet drift that so often undermines well-intentioned initiatives.

Indigenous SPCA was designed to be Indigenous-led from the beginning. The work now is to ensure that when leadership transitions occur, they are real, supported, and durable.

That is what makes them matter.