January Newsletter: Sharing Gratitude & Excitement for 2024!
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!
Hello,
In this month's newsletter, we want to highlight an Earth Week Challenge we ran in April to encourage teachers to bring Climate and Eco-Social Education into the classroom while creating collective impact.
How did we do?
Forty-nine teachers either took a pledge or committed to a specific action and between 910 and 1200 students received some form of Climate Education!
- Two teachers shared the Student Leadership for Change (SLC) library with their colleagues.
- Four teachers committed to deliver an Action Pack in their class, reaching 200 students.
- Student and teacher workshops: Twenty workshops were booked! Five Water is Life, 5 Youth Climate Ambassadors and 2 habitat clean-ups were delivered so far, reaching 260 Students. We also partnered with BCTF for a special Earth Week offering. Eight educators joined our Pro-D April 20th and 15 classes streamed our Earth Day student workshop across BC to 450 Students!
- Four teachers joined our emerging action network and map, bringing our total to 26 teachers and 15 student groups.
- Seven new teachers and 3 students completed our Climate Education Reform Survey, bringing our total to 118 teachers and 193 students.
Teachers - it's not too late to bring climate to the classroom, we encourage you to make use of our resources and bring climate education to your class! It’s not climate for now, it’s climate forever.
If you're excited about our Earth Day efforts, consider becoming a donor of Be the Change Earth Alliance. Donors help make this work possible! You can empower educators and students to take action on climate change through a tax-deductible gift today!
With gratitude for your life-affirming efforts,
George Radner (he/him)
Executive Director
Latest posts
December 2023 Newsletter - ⛄‘Tis the season to celebrate at Be The Change!⛄
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:
Oct 2023 Newsletter - Check out our mid-October climate-justice resources!
Hello,
An introduction from Communications Coordinator, Lucy Wicken
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.
