Jasmine Redfern is an Inuk lawyer and the Managing Director of Small Economy Works, an organization that helps people build the skills, confidence, and connections to create opportunity in Northern, Indigenous, rural, and other underserved communities. 

Small Economy Works takes a deeply relational and locally responsive approach to economic development. Rather than measuring success only by the number of businesses launched, SEW invests in people: strengthening their capacity to recognize opportunities, test ideas, navigate systems, and build livelihoods rooted in their own communities. Its work is grounded in the understanding that one person with greater confidence, skills, and agency can create opportunities that ripple outward through families, organizations, and local economies.

Over more than 15 years, Jasmine has worked across law, Indigenous governance, public institutions, nonprofit leadership, adjudication, and community development. This cross-sectoral experience allows her to see connections across systems and translate between institutional priorities, complex ideas, and people’s lived realities. 

A natural storyteller and facilitator, Jasmine has a particular gift for finding the human meaning beneath policy and organizational language; communicating it in ways people can understand, remember, and act on. At Small Economy Works, she brings these strengths to a larger question: how investing deeply in people can build small economies, strengthen communities, and create credible reasons for hope.