The Seven Summits Centre for Learning is receiving more than $9,000 to integrate environmental education into its outdoor education program.
The centre is receiving $9,250 through the Columbia Basin Trust Environment Grants program to introduce an environmental education component into its Outdoor Youth Leadership Program.
“Our teacher Jonny Coleshill will be in charge of gathering a variety of environmental stewards in our community such as CKISS [Central Kootenay Invasive Species Society] … and also FORR [Friends of the Rossland Range] and all those groups that do environmental stuff in our area and they’ll work with the kids to bring an environmental piece to all our outdoor components,” explains Ann Quarterman, operations manager for Seven Summits.
Students participating in the Outdoor Youth Leadership Program engage in physical outdoor activities such as rock climbing, hiking and swimming while learning about the local area and now that learning will include environmental education as well.
“So they will learn a lot of outdoor education in terms of how to hike, how to ski, how to do backcountry, their avalanche training, all sorts of things. But there’ll also be an environmental component that will build into their curriculum that we do here through the B.C. ministry curriculum, where they’re learning about biology stuff and environmental education stuff,” says Quarterman.
Seven Summits also received $1,000 from Teck towards the environmental component of the program.
“Teck gave us this money so that we would be able to build on it because a lot of granters would want to see that someone else is contributing,” says Quarterman.
She also wanted to acknowledge the City of Rossland, which provided a letter of support for Seven Summits grant application.
