Vision

We want to protect the forested space between our school and the neighbouring highschool. We feel that if community members can explore and learn from this space in the same way we have, individuals will be compelled to take better care of this Healing Forest!

Action

Through a number of youth action projects, our class has taken steps towards preserving the forested space and protecting the diversity found there. The gifts that we receive from learning in this space were made abundantly clear to us at the beginning of the school year and we wanted to dedicate our efforts to cleaning, revitalizing and protecting this space. Students took part in the Learning For a Sustainable Future Youth Action seminars to gain knowledge about how to create a plan of action. We were inspired after hearing from the Parks Canada “(Re)Building Better” workshop. From there, we planned that we were going to take part in an Earth Day clean up of the forested area. We wanted to change our community clean up practices and avoid using single-use plastic gloves that have traditionally been used. Through the LSF grant, we purchased grabber aids and buckets to help us collect and sort the waste that had piled up in the space. We then contacted the municipal forestry department who worked with our administrators to secure the planting of 30 trees for the space to help diversify the species found in our community. Planting is expected to begin at the end of May, 2024. From there, students were further inspired to take action by creating a petition to send to local officials to raise awareness about the importance of the space and to lobby for municipal action to help clean litter and debris, as well as to help remove graffitti on some of the mature trees. A community clean up is scheduled for June where students and their families, as well as members of the high school and local Indigenous community are invited to come and learn and share in the space. We have ordered paints from a local Indigenous paint supplier so that students can create “healing rocks” from sustainable paint materials that we can offer as gifts to the forest that has given us so much. We use it as an extension of our classroom and have lots of feelings of gratitude for the space. We hope that the more use the forest gets for outdoor education, the more maintained it will be and thus more community members will access and enjoy the space. This project has launched us into stewardship and we plan to spread our learning to the school community through assemblies, announcements, art installments, etc.