Be The Change Earth Alliance (BTCEA) was founded in 2005 to support positive, interconnected environmental and social change in schools and communities.
Our mission is to inspire, educate, and empower youth to take personal and collective action for a just, sustainable, resilient, and personally-fulfilling world.
Happy New Year! We hope you had a memorable holiday season and a positive start to 2024. At Be the Change, we are energized and excited for the year ahead!
As 2023 comes to a close and school winds down for winter break, we’re taking a moment to reflect back over the past year. 2023 was a very regenerative time for BTCEA! We developed and delivered our Climate Action, Resilience, and Emotions (CARE) program in communities on the frontlines of wildfires in our province. And as an organization, we prioritized creating space to discuss what decolonization could look like both internally, and in our programming. Here are the highlights:
Hello,
Dear Be The Change community,
As we approach mid-October, I’m reflecting on the changing seasons, from the warm and active days of summer to the cooler and quieter days of autumn. Personally, I’ve noticed a desire to slow down, take on fewer responsibilities, and stay inside where it’s cozy. Have you felt this way too?
As 21st century humans living in a world that operates under capitalism, white supremacy, and other oppressive systems, we can be made to feel guilt or shame about listening & responding to our needs. We are expected to maintain the same energy and productivity levels throughout the year, no matter how cold or dark the days are, how heavy world events feel, or how much we’re struggling in our personal lives.
This is where the concept of regenerative education comes in. Introduced to the BTCEA team by former staff member Jake, regenerative education calls on us to slow down and turn inward to consider our connection with the natural world. It asks us to examine the living systems that are breaking down due to violent human activity (such as fossil fuel extraction, destruction of Indigenous lands, and human-caused flooding and wildfires) and connect this breakdown with our own high levels of stress.
This summer, our team of five program assistants at Be the Change Earth Alliance (BTCEA) were tasked with Student Leadership for Change (SLC) revisions. We wanted these lessons to match our important values of justice, anti-racism, anti-oppression, and diversity.
As we looked through the lesson plans, we noticed some things that didn't feel right. For example, some resources in the lesson plans spoke about BIPOC communities from a white person’s perspective, instead of someone in that community. Some lesson plan’s only included BIPOC perspectives 3-4 pages into the workbook, positioning them as something of an after note. We also identified some outdated language, and had critiques around the general structure of some of the lesson plans, feeling they could be more oriented around anti-oppression and anti-racism than they currently are. We wanted to change this and make sure the lessons respect and centre the perspectives of the people they talk about. Social justice and environmental justice are intrinsically linked. We understood that the content we offer to educators must not only empower students but also emphasize that climate and environmental justice must include all other fights for justice.
Being engaged in climate action can sometimes feel like a never ending doom scrolling cycle, characterized by images of fire, floods, and destruction. Moments of righteous anger can translate into action, but the overwhelming and emotionally draining nature of the climate crisis often makes that action unsustainable. This burnout can especially be seen among youth organizers, teenagers who should be in one of the most carefree periods of their lives. Climate change’s mind boggling scale, rapid timeline, and existential consequences is understandably difficult to process.
What is GIS?
A geographic information system (GIS) is a computer-based tool used to analyze and visualize data that contains location information, known as geographic or geospatial data. For example, global population data is connected to a location so it could be visualized in a GIS by creating a map. One of the key strengths of maps is their ability to summarize and display a large amount of geographic data in a visually-appealing way, which makes it much easier to identify any patterns and trends in the data.
GIS has numerous applications in fields that involve environmental work, from natural resource management and conservation to climate change analysis. Many complex environmental problems require a data-informed approach, where GIS can play an important role in finding spatial relationships and visually presenting these results. However, it’s important to note that GIS is only a tool designed for a specific type of data. While GIS and maps are ideal at handling geographic data, alternative tools like spreadsheets and graphs may be much better suited to other types of data like numerical data.
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