DE has ini­ti­at­ed it’s ‘Cana­da Out­reach’ pro­gram which is focused on engag­ing youth across the coun­try to think cre­ative­ly and in ‘design’ terms about the envi­ron­men­tal chal­lenges that glob­al soci­ety is faced with. The idea emerged from inter­nal dis­cus­sions about the core of what DE is all about — which is solv­ing prob­lems using ‘design’ and ‘envi­ron­men­tal sci­ence’ and our incli­na­tion to help.
With the news of youth being con­cerned (and vis­i­bly frus­trat­ed) about their future, and mes­sages com­ing from our gov­ern­ment about being pre­pared for future ‘job churn’, we have decid­ed to share our expe­ri­ence, ener­gy, and skills to moti­vate youth to cre­ate their own path. ‘Job Churn’ is part of our own real­i­ty in that we have to con­stant­ly seek new oppor­tu­ni­ties and projects. One can see the neg­a­tive side of this which is the inse­cu­ri­ty, how­ev­er, on the pos­i­tive side it pro­vides the oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate one’s own real­i­ty.

The DE team has got­ten real­ly good at cre­at­ing our own real­i­ty. In fact, we have got­ten good enough work­ing as glob­al prob­lem solvers that we get called by coun­tries to help them out with sus­tain­abil­i­ty. We now want to share this expe­ri­ence and help those inter­est­ed to chart a new path for­ward for them­selves and their com­mu­ni­ties. Our first step with this process has been hav­ing two of our team, Melin­da Fel­so (based in Cal­gary) and Saman­tha Moren­cy (based in Mon­tre­al), start to reach out to edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions across the coun­try to ask them how we can help. In addi­tion, we have extend­ed an open invi­ta­tion to these groups to have them con­tribute to our ‘Insights’ sus­tain­abil­i­ty con­tent plat­form which can be found here.

We are going to work with these insti­tu­tions to devel­op a num­ber of ini­tia­tives that will cul­ti­vate a sense of empow­er­ment, mean­ing, and future for youth, ground­ed in our mis­sion of ‘solv­ing prob­lems using design and envi­ron­men­tal sci­ence’. For inquiries please con­tact Melin­da (melinda@design-environment.com) or Saman­tha (samantha@design-environment.com).

Stay tuned … we are just get­ting start­ed!