During our very eventful meeting Betty Marsh passed on her nomination for the Whyte Night Award last quarter to Eli Schrader for his dedicated and enthusiastic work with our community’s youth. We welcomed back Stan Bissell who was a founding member of the Whyte Ave club and has again been sworn in as a full member with support from his partner David and son Ewan.
Our speaker this week was Shelly Vermillion who shared her story and her inspiration behind her starting Naoka Inc., a vehicle safety whip company. Shelly said she would never be a entrepreneur because she grew up seeing the struggles that come with it, but after working with the Dene community health department and seeing untapped labour forces she decided to dedicate opening her business to keep people in the oil field safe and on the principles of respect, integrity, safety, people first, and quality products. Shelly focuses on using as many Canadian products as possible in production and through focusing on helping relieve the unemployment rate maintains an 80-85% aboriginal people employment base, but open to everyone and including immigrants. Her experience in business it that paying attention to people is what keeps employees happy so she believes in supporting any education an employee and the principle of flex hours as the time people want and are able to work is when they’ll be most productive. Her ideals and ability to uphold them earned her recognition through the Alberta Chamber of Commerce 2015 Aboriginal Business Women Award of Distinction.
