Happy Thanksgiving! We’re stuffing our newsletter with thanks for you! We hope you had a delicious and restful long weekend.
It’s been a busy first month of the school year and we would love to share what’s been going on at Be the Change this past month. Let’s Fall into it!
The 2023/2024 school year is wrapping up, and what a fantastic year it has been! As the summer break approaches, we’ve been reminiscing about all the wonderful things we’ve had the opportunity to be involved with this year. From educational resource development to workshop delivery, our staff and volunteers have put their hearts and souls into the work we do here.
Introducing the Action Network: Action network map - Be The Change Earth Alliance
Be The Change is launching an exciting new resource to help connect passionate youth and educators across BC! This site showcases the stories of students and educators and highlights the actions taken by our network of changemakers through an interactive map.
Happy Earth Day! Today is a great opportunity to take a moment to connect with nature, practice gratitude, and reflect on the past few months as the seasons begin to change. The past couple months at Be The Change have been busy and rewarding, and we’d love to share some of our favourite moments with you!
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.
