Michael Ableman has achieved something many thought impossible: creating thriving urban farms on pavement and contaminated soil in one of Canada’s poorest neighbourhoods.
Sole Food Street Farms in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is an area almost entirely inhabited by folks who are dealing with long-term addiction, mental illness and poverty, says Ableman, who co-founded the urban farm venture in 2009 with Seann Dory.
A dragonfly that has not been seen in B.C. for 40 years is just one of the discoveries made by citizen scientists over the summer, as part of a major effort to catalogue the province’s plants and animals.
The rare Grappletail Dragonfly was spotted during a hike in July in Davis Lake Provincial Park near Mission. This dragonfly is ‘red-listed’ on the B.C. Conservation Data Centre’s list, which means many believed the species had gone extinct.
But thanks to a local resident out on a hike, B.C.’s scientists now know that a small swarm of the dragonfly exists in this part of the province.
With many people spending more time outdoors due to the COVID – 19 pandemic, the BC Parks Foundation launched B.C.’s Big Nature Challenge in which the public is encouraged to help log and identify plants, animals, insects and fungi. So far, almost one million photos have been uploaded.
Geoff Green is sporting a healthy tan and looking surprisingly relaxed at an early August reception at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. True, he has just come off a 14-day cruise, but this was no luxury excursion.
Mr. Green has just returned from shepherding 130 high school and university students, and roughly the same number of educators, scientists, historians, elders, artists and support staff, on an expedition to Greenland and the eastern Canadian High Arctic. It was his 35th expedition to the polar regions since he founded Students on Ice (SOI), an award-winning organization specializing in educational forays into the Arctic and Antarctic, 19 years ago.
A Vancouver program pairs a volunteer mother with mothers who are living in poverty, to offer support, guidance and friendship.
Seventeen-year-old Jacoby Macdonald wants to smash the stigma of young Indigenous women being seen as victims, an image often created by disheartening statistics around high school drop-out rates, teenage pregnancies and low employment.
“Me, statistically, the odds are kind of against me. But you are not a number, you are not a statistic, you are more than that — you are a person,” insists Macdonald, a Grade 12 student at Gladstone Secondary in East Vancouver.
“We are not a stigma. We can do anything we set our minds to.”
‘If we have less kids getting actively involved in that lifestyle, we will have … less gangsters with guns’
You’ve heard this refrain before — giving money to homeless people is not the best way to help them because it might be squandered, or spent on harmful habits. But a new Canadian study makes a powerful case to the contrary.
The study, dubbed “The New Leaf Project,” is an initiative of Foundations for Social Change, a charitable organization based in Vancouver, in partnership with the University of British Columbia.
Researchers gave 50 recently homeless people a lump sum of 7,500 Canadian dollars (nearly $5,700). They followed the cash recipients’ life over 12-18 months and compared their outcomes to that of a control group who didn’t receive the payment.
An ambitious social venture will support healing in the Kwakwaka’wakw community, fostering wellness and cultural resiliency, while offering visitors the chance to immerse themselves in the history and geography of their traditional territory in the southern Great Bear Rainforest.
DZAWADA’ENUXW NATION, KWIKWASUT’INUXW HAXWA’MIS NATION
At Hada River estuary, in the heart of Musga’makw Dzawada’enuxw territory, Chief Maxwiyalidizi (K’odi Nelson) is bringing an ambitious, hopeful vision to life. Nawalakw will offer cultural immersion and wellness programing supported through a world class ecotourism operation. It will be the first place on earth where Kwak̓wala is once again spoken immersively.
When the Heiltsuk people had the opportunity to build a wellness centre in their territory, they turned to their own people and their own culture to define what the word means for them. Launched this summer, the Kunsoot Wellness Centre offers a lesson in how to take a more rooted and honest approach to well-being.
