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!
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.
Hello
Summer is a season for relaxation, joy, and contemplation. It is a season for feeling our bodies in the warm sun and cool water and taking time to recharge and reconnect with our families, the natural world, and ourselves. It is a time for harvesting our gardens, both literally and figuratively.
Hello,
Spring is a time when living systems begin their cyclical transition from wintering rest, back into a state of new growth. Together, the members of ecosystemic communities co-participate in bloom, regeneration, renewal and synergistic relationships. These relationships allow collective emergence and wellbeing.
Hello,
What can we learn from winter? Tuning into the intelligence of the natural world through listening to how it moves, adapts and expresses itself is one-way to live a more life-attuned life and tap into the wisdom of billions of years of evolution.
Imagine the power of education, when we foster a deep awareness of the wisdom of the natural world and facilitate a deeply embodied connection to that wisdom by helping our students see and feel the patterns of nature alive in their being.
Hello,
In our final newsletter of the year, we wanted to start off by giving a heartfelt THANK YOU to you for being a supportive member and participant in our community! Our teachers, supporters, volunteers, members and donors are the reason we have had such a successful year. I want to offer gratitude for those who donated in our Giving Tuesday campaign – we raised over $15,000 to go towards educating and empowering 10,000 students on climate change over the next year!
Below, we highlight a story of one of our most impactful programs! Enjoy!
Hello,
Today marks our 17th year of bringing transformative, eco-social learning to youth and community members across BC. Thank you for being here with us, on a shared journey of realizing education truly transformative and regenerative for people, communities, ecology and climate!
As the Fall season sets in, it offers us an opportunity to reflect on how the seasonal rhythms of our Earth show their essence in the rhythms of our own lives. For many, the Fall time of year is for new beginnings - another school year, another chapter. In this sense, it may feel more closely like Spring, as we grow new shoots, embrace new opportunity, new potential, new possibility and begin to pick up momentum. We can experience the essences of seasons and cycles in our day, our week, our month, a lifetime.
In the seasonal cycle, Fall is a time for harvest after a long summer season of mature growth. In our lives, times of Fall are when we celebrate and harvest the gifts of our efforts, commitments and projects. Fall is when we begin to slow down into reflection, enjoy the fruits of our labour and to shed, digest and recycle what is not needed so we have the space and nutrients for our next Spring cycle.
Hello,
After a productive and creative summer at Be the Change, we couldn't be more excited for the new school year!
Over the summer, we worked with six Program Assistant to update and augment our Student Leadership for Change library of learning resources.
Teachers, here’s just a taste of the improvements within SLC: to better navigate the SLC library, check out our new walk-through video! To guide students in meaning learning on the UN SDGs, explore our SDG Unit, with updated powerpoints, lesson plans, and a student action tracker. And your students will love our re-branded Community Building Action Pack – perfect for students after several years of pandemic isolation.
Hi,
With the support of our dedicated teachers, donors and community members, BTCEA had one of our most successful (and busy) school years ever. We educated and empowered over 15,000 youth to take action on the environment and climate change.