Elaine Alec (teɬkənitkʷ) is syilx and secwépemc and a registered member of the Penticton Indian Band. She is an entrepreneur, having founded and led seven companies over the past 25 years. Her work spans building teams, designing intellectual property and curriculum, and developing models that can scale and adapt across different contexts. She has led organizations through growth, transition, and complexity, with teams of up to 25 people, while continuing to refine and apply her work in real-world conditions.

She currently works at the intersection of governance and complex multi-party environments across Canada. She contributes through writing, design, and process by helping leaders build the human readiness required for structural alignment in high-stakes work.

Her focus is disciplined listening and capacity-building: clarifying decision rights, strengthening relational accountability, and weaving Indigenous knowledge systems with systems thinking so governance structures can function under pressure.

For more than two decades, Elaine has worked across Indigenous governance, politics, land use, community planning, and economic development. She brings lived experience navigating layered jurisdictions, constitutional realities, and cross-cultural negotiation environments.

Elaine is the founder of Naqsmist Storytellers Inc.and the creator of Cultivating Safe Spaces (CSS), a practical framework that strengthens internal and relational capacity in complex systems. She currently contributes as Practice Partner at Coeuraj, bringing her lens and methods into governance, infrastructure and capital alignment initiatives. She is the author of Calling My Spirit Back and Coming of Age: Overcoming Trauma to achieve Self-Determination.

Her work moves in a few clear ways. She delivers keynote talks that blend story and teaching, offering an entry point into the CSS framework and the conditions required for strong leadership and community.

For those wanting to learn and apply the work directly, Cultivating Safe Spaces provides structured learning, practice, and pathways for deeper integration.

Naqsmist Storytellers Inc., works alongside communities and organizations on governance, strategic planning, and engagement processes that require relational accountability across leadership, staff, youth, and elders.

In more complex, multi-party environments, she also contributes through Coeuraj, supporting alignment and shared understanding across systems with those prepared to commit the time, resources, and responsibility this work requires.