Coming Home to Plant New Roots

When Ashley returned to her home community of London Ontario (Deshkan Ziibiing – Antler River) from Australia, she worked for a School Board, University and Indigenous Consulting Firm, but continued to consult on the side. Ashley fell in love with working with local First Nations and the urban Indigenous community in allyship on various projects. Consistent with community-based partnerships research, Ashley hired, trained, mentored, and learned from youth from the Communities (mostly local First Nations) that she served. Eventually, the work exceeded Ashley’s capacity in her other roles, and she had to decide whether to invest her time into other organizations or her own. Ultimately, Ashley decided to take a risk and focus her time on building an organization uniquely geared toward her passion—community-based partnership work with equity-denied Communities. In 2014, she incorporated and has since focused on building relationships, developing quality products and services, and creating positive impacts in Communities.

Building our Dream Team with the Communities we Serve

As the business continued to grow, Ashley knew she had to hire a team, and was set on finding the best people. She started by hiring a Director of Operations to support the transformation of SISCO from consultancy to a staffed firm. Bringing over a decade of senior leadership experience with a large corporation, Alisha Fowler joined in 2019, and has since helped to establish SISCO as a workplace that is fun, wellness-focused, and safe and inclusive for people all genders, sexual orientations, cultural backgrounds, and neurotypes. In building our team, we have always been intentional about representing the Communities we serve. SISCO is proud to be a woman-led, majority woman-operated and majority Indigenous operated company, with an Indigenous woman-led and operated Research team and strategic partnerships with firms representing the other Communities we serve.

Treaty Relationships & Expanding into new Communities and Internationally

Before long we learned that the community-focused, respectful and reciprocal approach we bring to our work with Indigenous Communities—based on a deep understanding that Communities know best what they want and need, they just sometimes require support and advocacy—benefits all equity-denied groups!

Serving Indigenous Communities, organizations and partners in Turtle Island (North America), has been and will remain the heart of what we do, both because we see this work as an extension of our treaty responsibilities. However, in 2022, we began expanding:

• into support for other equity-denied Communities, including:
  • women and gender diverse,
  • neurodivergent,
  • 2SLGBTQIA+,
  • black and racialized, and
  • newcomer Communities; and
• internationally into:
  • Australia,
  • Chile, and
  • we continue to build our work in these and other international markets.

Celebrating Our 10 Year Anniversary With Our Cottage

For years we have considered purchasing an office space. However, since we are a remotely-based team in the information sector with employees in different locations, a conventional office facility did not make sense for us. Instead, we have been regularly renting out space for team members to meet for collaborative writing and team retreats. In 2024, we purchased a corporate cottage in Port Franks, central to many of our remotely based employees. Located in a wooded area, nestled by a stunning wetland and steps from Lake Huron, Retreat Yourself is a place for our employees to access a quiet corner of the world in nature to write, collaborate with one another, and recharge. That same year, we celebrated our ten (10) year anniversary at the cottage together!