Community Engagement

In this digital age, people are increasingly living an isolated lifestyle that is disconnected from the community and their local ecosystems. Socioecological literacy and environmental connection are preconditions for community climate resilience — but current public engagement practices often fail to build lasting relationships between people and the landscapes they depend on.

What we're doing:

"We can't know what we can't observe. And we can't protect what we don't know". Based on this, we actively engage with the local communities, including our own Evergreen neighborhood, pursuing various activities.

This includes:

• Nature journaling is radically accessible — all you need is a notebook and a pencil or a pen. It scales from children to seniors, requires no scientific background, and has been shown to build the kind of slow, attentive relationship with place that is foundational to building community resilience. Nature journaling is not about drawing pretty pictures. But about thinking, wondering, and connecting the dots. Trained by WildWonder.org, a leading nature journaling education and training organization led by John Muir Laws, we apply principles such as "I observe", "I wonder", and "It reminds me of".
  • Leading nature journaling workshops in Calgary's Evergreen neighborhood and along the Bow River corridor
  • Documenting how consistent journaling practice changes participants' relationship to local ecosystems and climate change
  • Building a community archive of observations that captures phenological change over time
  • Connecting journaling communities to the broader citizen science and Indigenous land stewardship networks in the region
• Engaging with local non-profit organizations and the city to distill current frontier science on pressing challenges such as climate change and their implications for the local community
• Providing tools to reduce water, food, and energy dependence
• Stewarding local public open spaces such as Fish Creek Provincial Park
• Partnering with Evergreen Community Association to steward and maintain two little free libraries

Project Leads

Juhi Huda

Hrishi Chandanpurkar

Collaborate

Interested in contributing to this project? We welcome researchers, community partners, and funders.