Neyaashiinigmiing - based medical practice meets community where it at | Exeter Lakeshore Times Advance

lakeshoreadvance.com · Feb 19, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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SUPPLIED/THE SUN TIMES/POSTMEDIA NETWORKA member of Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation has opened Noongwa Wellness clinic, a medical practice serving fellow community members at Neyaashiinigmiing and neighbouring Saugeen First Nation.Dr. Elisa Levi has a roster of about 200 First Nations members who are patients to date. Her goal is to sign a total of 550 patients and to have begun construction on a clinic building at Neyaashiinigmiing, overlooking Sydney Bay by year’s end.Recommended VideosThe $2.5-million fundraising campaign for the health clinic to be built overlooking Sydney Bay got a boost recently with a $1 million donation over three years from Bruce Power and its suppliers. A site has been cleared for the building.Noongwa Wellness is overseen by the Noongwa Gamig Incorporated not-for-profit, which is run by a board of directors. Interim board chair Robin Jones said having an Anishinaabe doctor delivering care within the community was the loudest need heard in consultations.The word Noongwa means “today” but in a sense that embodies the idea of “mindfulness for a new day, or for now and the opportunities that it brings,” Jones said in an interview. “It’s very connected to what’s happening, right? It’s very symbolic in lots of ways.”Dr. Levi responded to a call for proposals for an Indigenously focused funding model in the Ontario government’s plan to connect 500,000 patients without a doctor to primary care. Her Indigenous Primary Health Care Organization application was granted in October.Neighbouring Saugeen First Nation in 2024 got provincial funding for a new, culturally sensitive health team, which included a nurse practitioner and other health care providers.The Ontario government has said it intends to connect everyone without a family doctor to a publicly funded primary care clinician or team by 2029. Last month, the province said it was on track to meet its first-year goal of attaching 300,000 patients to primary care.As of June 2025, about 1.98 million people in Ontario didn’t have a family doctor or other primary care provider.While Wiarton doctors and nurses saw patients for a couple of days a week at the First Nation for years, doctors retired and so their visits to the reserve stopped, Levi said.Jones said the hope is to establish a permanent home for the clinic on the reserve, and offer other health-related services, all overseen by an executive director. Currently the centre has a medical administrator, a nurse and Dr. Levi.“We wanted to set up a structure that would live beyond any person. If doctor Levi ever chose to leave, that this would still be in place,” Jones said. Members of Saugeen Ojibway Nation may visit the clinic’s website to apply to be patients.Jones said an elder once told her she must feed her spirit to keep it healthy. Noongwa Wellness “feeds my spirit, knowing that there is culturally safe, holistic health care within the community, provided by one of our own,” within “our own homelands. And that’s a big part of this.”Levi stressed the differences too. The new clinic building will be inspired by Indigenous culture, she said. Her whole approach will be “culturally safe,” meaning free of racism, which “a lot of community members have faced,” she said in an interview.“Being mistreated perhaps in the health care system, not having understanding and context of colonial issues that have impacted peoples,” Levi said are also part of traditional health care.“Bruce Power’s contribution is saying how can we make clients feel welcomed and respectful and that their culture is leading health care vs it being a very biomedical model . . . and that we see people first and that we acknowledge that there may be systems of inequity for people, and that traditional health and wellness are part of their care.” A view of Sydney Bay at Neyaashiinigmiing. SUPPLIED/THE SUN TIMES/POSTMEDIA NETWORKShe said the aim is to build a “non-institutional environment.” The concept is for each clinical room to look out over Sydney Bay from Sydney Bay Road. Local art and calming environments that include cultural teachings are to be included.Levi imagines a teaching area around nutrition, possibly having an apothecary of plant-based medicines.Currently Levi is seeing patients in a doctor’s office in Wiarton and doing home visits. She’ll be moving to a mobile office at the permanent clinic site at Neyaashiinigmiing until the clinic building is built.Levi was raised in Toronto and at her father’s First Nation, the Elsipogtog First Nation in New Brunswick. She lived at Neyaashiinigmiing for less than two years, while attending high school in Wiarton in the mid-1990s.While her parents and other family lived at Neyaashiinigmiing, she visited them often, creating her connection with the community, she said. She still has extended family at Neyaashiinigmiing and she is a community member, she said.Levi studied medicine as a mid-career move, after earning a Bachelor of Applied Science in Nutrition from Toronto Metropolitan University and a Master of Public Health from Lakehead University.Levi said she’s been practicing medicine in the region since 2023, part of the McMaster University Rural Family Medicine program. Her intention always was to return to care for her own community by establishing its first primary health-care facility, she said.“I think when I realized that there was no place to practise after finishing residency,” she started talking about creating a clinic at Neyaashiinigmiing. When the provincial call for proposals arose, the pieces started falling into place, Levi said.The acting chief at Neyaashiinigmiing, Jessica Keeshig-Martin, said in an interview she and band council support and look forward to Levi’s practice to be based in Neyaashiinigmiing.“Anishinabek people are often lacking access to medical services and often there’s not enough Indigenous doctors to ensure that our services for our people are safe and culturally relevant. So we’re excited about this entity being here.” Dr. Elisa Levi, left, and Janine Manning, join Bruce Power Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice-President James Scongack in announcing the company’s pledge of $1 million to fund the Noongwa Wellness project. SUPPLIED/THE SUN TIMES/POSTMEDIA NETWORK Join the Conversation This website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. Read more about cookies here. 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