SLC: Student Leadership for Change is an education curriculum that inspires youth to connect, understand, and respond to the environmental and social challenges facing our planet. This comprehensive suite of experiential, project-based curriculum materials helps students connect global issues to local solutions by taking specific, measurable actions with their classmates and family. SLC fosters the development of student leadership skills by engaging the passion of youth to lead and be the change in their lives, households, schools, and communities. SLC is also available in French and Distance Learning formats as well.
CARE
This project engages youth and the educators who support them in order to build youth climate resilience and wellbeing in front line communities. It empowers youth to take climate action and navigate potentially powerful climate emotions by fostering personal and community resilience, agency and regeneration.
Be the Change Action Network
Our map showcases people, across BC, who are learning about the climate crisis and taking action. If you want to join a collaborative of like-hearted and like-minded individuals, join Be the Change Earth Alliance Network by registering for Student Leadership for Change, booking a youth workshop or joining a youth team to receive mentorship and support.
Water is Life Workshops
The Water is Life Workshop is a 2-part workshop designed to deepen students’ understanding of the climate crisis and engage them in taking action over time. Both parts also make connections to the Sustainable Development Goals, and weave in indigenous perspectives.
ReconnectING
ReconnectING: Imagination, Nature, and Gratitude is a two hour outdoor workshop designed to help students reconnect with nature and to equip them with an understanding of gratitude and imagination as tools for restoration and resistance.
Youth Climate Ambassador Workshops
The Youth Climate Ambassador Workshops is a collaborative project with the UBC Climate Hub to offer free workshops to empower Vancouver high school students to take action on climate change. These workshops aim to supplement existing resources with information about how high school students can become “Climate Ambassadors” and encourage their local communities to take action on climate change. By empowering young people to act and demonstrating how effective their actions can be, these workshops aim to foster a sense of agency and purpose.
Youth for Climate Justice
Youth for Climate Justice (Y4CJ) aims to equip diverse youth with essential skills, tools, and knowledge to build the capacity of youth for lifelong climate justice and advocacy. Y4CJ will empower youth (ages 12-18) across Metro Vancouver to design and launch meaningful climate justice projects in their communities. The empowering experiences, transferable skills, and mental health strategies will serve youth long after the program’s completion.
Youth for Climate Justice Resources
Over the past 3 years, BTCEA staff have created resources designed for our Youth for Climate Action (now Youth for Climate Justice) program. We developed these resources based on our previous experience with climate action, organizing, and education, as well as through consultations with diverse youth to identify their needs and the barriers they face. These resources aim to address complex environmental and climate issues through a justice lens.
We wanted to share them publicly so youth teams, teachers and individuals could use them to take climate action in their communities.
SDG Unit
The SDG Unit is a new package of learning resources by Be the Change Earth Alliance that helps middle & high school teachers engage their students in meaningful learning and action around the SDGs. The SDG Unit is found within our library of online learning resources, Student Leadership for Change. Registration for SLC is free for all BC teachers, providing you access to the SDG Unit and a host of other climate, environmental and social justice teaching materials
Climate Action Unit
The Climate Action Unit new for Fall 2019 features: 3 customized Lesson Plans focusing on Climate Change, Climate Systems and Climate Action, 12 of BCTEA’s ‘Action Packs’ updated to reflect the urgency of the climate crisis and 1 brand new Climate Justice Action Pack. The landmark IPCC report released in October 2018 that highlights we now have just 11 years to radically transform our economies and societies away from fossil fuels. This Climate Action Unit will provide students with the most up to date resources on Climate Change related issues and emphasize the powerful role that they can play in transforming our societies and communities to address climate change.
Climate and Connection Unit
When the Covid-19 pandemic is brought under control, will society return to what was "normal" beforehand? Will we return to burning the same rate as fossil fuels as beforehand? Will the states of worry, isolation and loneliness that many people are experiencing due to the pandemic continue? As young people, we can take action in our own lives right now to help mitigate climate change and build more connected and resilient communities. Through the Climate & Connection Unit, let's explore how to take climate action, and how to find deeper connection to self, our values, other people, and the natural world.
Youth Habitat Clean-Ups
Habitat clean-ups offer an excellent, hands-on learning experience that will enable students to learn about waste management in a fun and safe environment while simultaneously helping make their community and cities a better and healthier place to live!
Professional Development Workshops
Our professional development workshops have been delivered to hundreds of teachers who are interested in learning about our leading-edge curricular and pedagogical tools to engage their students' inquiry both in and outside the classroom, on environmental sustainability. Through this workshop, participants gain a greater understanding of a values-based, action-oriented approach to environmental education and the 21st-century pedagogical approaches to empower student leadership for Change.
Action Guide
The Be The Change Action Guide is your map to an exciting journey of personal choices, leading you to an empowered lifestyle and expanded worldview that will help sustain your health, your spirit, and the planet. It covers a full range of lifestyle choices and helps us become aware of how every single action we take either supports or undermines our vision for a sustainable, just and fulfilling future for all life.
Rain Garden
Be the Change Earth Alliance started a project, called Water is Life. The project aims to empower youth aged 14-18 across Metro Vancouver to take individual and collective action to address threats facing Canadian freshwater ecosystems during the 2021-2023 school years.
Youth Action Tracker and Map
The Youth Action Map collects and displays stories of projects that students have tried or completed to make their schools and communities more sustainable!
Reclaiming the Environmental Narrative
REN will support 6-12 BIPOC youth (aged 14-24) to each develop a multimedia storytelling project that explores their relationship with nature, the climate crisis, and the environmental challenges that are important to them and their community.
Youth for Climate Action
Youth for Climate Action (Y4CA), a pilot project during the 2020-21 school year, aims to help tackle both climate change and youth ecological despair. Through Y4CA, Be the Change Earth Alliance (BTCEA) will empower teams of Vancouver youth (ages 14-18) to design and implement meaningful climate action projects in their communities.
Climate Action Champions Initiative (CAChI)
Climate Action Champion (CAChI) is a groundbreaking initiative that educates and engages youth in individual, home, school, and neighbourhood climate actions. Through various district, school, and community activities, the CAChI program will inform students on complex climate change issues, engage them in local solutions, and activate their passion for climate action. Assembly presentations, in-class workshops, curricular resources, an online action and engagement portal, and a Climate Action Week will engage approximately 20,000 students, their peers, families, and neighbours in the importance of taking action for the climate in 2018.
Citizens of the Future (CotF)
Tackling climate change will require an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ mentality and our Citizens of the Future initiative brings more individuals ‘on deck.’ Building on our Climate Action Champions initiative (see details below), this CotF will educate and empower at-risk youth (who are often left out of environmental action conversations) and emerging youth sustainability leaders (who need additional support). Through CotF we will provide in-depth Climate Leadership training to students, facilitate workshops with at-risk youth, deliver environmental action assemblies, foster youth-led actions and project, train volunteers who will be invited to give climate action presentations and provide mentorship to students, and showcase youth action projects.
Social Innovation in Environmental Education Research
BTCEA’s Founding Director, Maureen Jack-LaCroix is the principal investigator for Ph.D. research into social innovation interventions within B.C.’s education system for influencing the development of a school culture that nurtures environmentally conscious citizens. Utilizing the Social Innovation Lab technology, BTCEA and Maureen have embarked on a community-action research process that will bring educational stakeholders together to share professional knowledge and best practices and to prototype school-based activities, projects, and initiatives that will empower sustainable culture change in schools.
Waste Watchers
Waste Watchers is a suite of waste education resources and activities that engage students in local zero waste solutions through education that empowers behavior change. Resources are best suited for students in a leadership class or environmental club and who the capacity to plan and take action to help their schools get to zero waste. Our educational approach focuses on the issues surrounding zero waste, such as climate change and resource depletion, while supporting youth to champion zero waste initiatives in their schools, homes, and communities.
Symposium
The Awaken and Change Symposium is a thought-provoking, challenging, and deeply moving multimedia presentation that features the combined wisdom of such international luminaries as Julia Butterfly Hill, Paul Hawken, Brian Swimme, Maude Barlowe, Van Jones, and Desmond Tutu. Through a powerful combination of rich audiovisual materials, cutting-edge information and personal reflection exercises, trained facilitators lead participants through an exploration of critical questions about our relationship with the planet.
