Meet Teqare: the Indigenous business bringing cyber education to Manitoba’s First Nations

Take a casual glance at Teqare’s social media posts and they almost look like scenes from a travel documentary.

For starters—you have a small, dedicated Indigenous team journeying through Manitoba’s rugged landscape. Sometimes, they’re on a float plane or pontoon boat. Other times, they’re on the backs of ATVs and snowmobiles, headed to the farthest flung First Nations communities.

Their mission? Deliver hands-on, culturally grounded educational workshops that cover everything from cyber safety and digital literacy to scam prevention and financial life skills.

Darion Ducharme, an entrepreneur from the Lac Seul First Nation, knows first-hand the issues that a lack of technical and digital literacy creates. Having spent 10 years working as a telecom sales rep and store manager, he would regularly witness people from every demographic getting ensnared by cyber scams.

“What we were seeing was anybody from people in their twenties and thirties, to elders and seniors being scammed,” he says. “You’d get people coming into the store, thinking that they need to pay off a massive CRA bill with iTunes gift cards. That’s when I recognized just how quickly the technology was advancing and that hackers and scammers were on the cutting edge.”

But the biggest problem, Ducharme adds, was that many of the people visiting his store often didn’t have a trusted someone—be it a child, grandchild or friend—to help them safely navigate this new technology landscape.

“Sometimes when you go to a cellphone kiosk at the mall, the people working there are so focused on sales that they’re not helping customers with basic digital literacy things like password etiquette, or understanding what multi-factor identification is,” he says.

Seeing a massive gap, Ducharme decided to, in his words, “jump out of the boat” and found Teqare (pronounced “tech-care”) in 2021.

He and his team made house calls that first year, helping customers with just about anything technology related—from filling out online COVID unemployment benefits forms, to setting up home theatre soundbars.

And while the tech support life treated them well initially, Ducharme soon realized that this wasn’t quite the audience he truly wanted to help. Thus began their transition from one-on-one tech consultations to group educational workshops held in First Nations communities.

Tech training based in trust and relatability

Today, Teqare’s bread and butter is working with schools on reserves, holding workshops for kids as young as Grade 2 and as old as Grade 12.

“We’re separating the age groups, so the younger kids get cyber education on how to stay safe online from predators and cyber bullies, the older group gets cyber safety as well as financial literacy training in areas like building credit,” explains Ducharme.

He points out that Teqare’s trainers are all First Nations and work to establish a deeper level of trust and rapport right off the bat.

“I think our trainers truly understand the unique issues First Nations peoples face,” says Ducharme. “They’re also amazing at bringing their own personal “why” into it and are not shy about sharing what motivated them to join Teqare—and even where they’ve fallen victim to cyber scams or made financial mistakes in the past.”

Since October 2024, the Teqare team’s travels have taken them to over 60 unique, rural First Nations in Manitoba. Some of these communities have two schools, too, which means they’ve been to well over 120 schools and put on 300 workshops.

“We’ll be in a classroom talking about cyber safety in online videogames and the teachers will come up to us afterwards and say, ‘Thank you, we honestly had no idea about any of this,” says Ducharme.

At the same time, Ducharme and his team will also put on cyber safety training sessions aimed at elders, where they provide basic digital literacy education on topics like creating strong passwords and being able to identify cyber scams.

One of the biggest issues impacting elders today, says Ducharme, are online romance scams.

“People are lonely and trying to find love on Facebook and dating apps. But the issue is that they end up transferring money to scammers,” he explains. “And what makes it so much worse is that there’s a lot of shame. People feel stupid, and don’t want to share the extent of the problem, so we really try to bring the walls down and get people talking in our workshops.”

Teqare makes a major splash at Pow Wow Pitch

Ducharme credits the annual Pow-Wow Pitch competition, which funds and supports early-stage Indigenous businesses, for bringing Teqare to a far wider audience. They had a successful run, too, placing third overall out of more than 300 entrants in 2024.

“We saw Pow Wow Pitch as an opportunity to get our business onto a bigger platform,” says Ducharme. “And I can say that, right after we did the competition, we started getting calls from across Canada to put on workshops. And that’s because Pow Wow Pitch just has such a massive footprint.”

As a seed sponsor of Pow Wow Pitch, CIRA offers free .CA domains to all Indigenous entrepreneurs who participate in the program. The goal here is to provide essential tools and resources that help Indigenous entrepreneurs establish a strong online presence, break down digital barriers and grow their businesses. 

“Having a .CA is one of the most important things for us because it shows we’re within Canada, and that we’re local,” says Ducharme. “People online just trust .CA more when they’re doing to our website. They know .CA means Canadian – so it feels like home, it’s safe.”

 What’s on the horizon for Teqare?

Suffice it to say, demand for their cyber safety workshops has picked up dramatically for Ducharme and his team, with no signs of slowing anytime soon. It’s a good problem to have, in other words.

At times, they’re travelling as far north as Churchill, Manitoba, or to communities just miles away from the U.S. border all within the same week.

“As we grow and expand, the vision for Teqare is to be Canada-wide. We want to be in every school,” says Ducharme. “At the end of the day, our goal is to go into these communities, make connections and leave them feeling empowered.”