Lake Superior Climate Action Field School launching thanks to funding from Environment and Climate Change Canada
May 12, 2021 – Thunder Bay, Ont.
Researchers at Lakehead University, Algoma University, the University of Minnesota Duluth, the Michigan Technical University, and community partners of the Lake Superior Labs Network have received more than $135,000 from Environment and Climate Change Canada to create the Lake Superior Climate Action Field School.
This August, the Field School will train a diverse group of young Canadians – poised to become regional and national climate leaders – through an experiential program of virtual workshops, community site visits, and events in coastal communities around the Lake Superior Watershed.
The Field School will be implemented using a hybrid virtual and on-site design that will include hubs in Thunder Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, Houghton, and Duluth. Participants in each hub will meet in person daily, conduct independent site visits, digitally document the experiences, and connect to share across hubs virtually for workshops.
“Our goal is to connect, learn with, and inspire emerging leaders and their communities to catalyze climate action across the Lake Superior Watershed,” said Dr. Lindsay Galway, Associate Professor in the Department of Health Sciences at Lakehead University and Canada Research Chair in Social-Ecological Health.
The Field School will use hands-on, experiential learning to implement 14 knowledge and skill-building workshops and nine site visits focused on climate action across the Lake Superior watershed.
It will connect students with 24 climate leaders from the project’s leadership team at the forefront of community-based climate action initiatives across the Lake
Superior watershed.
Researchers will host a series of public events and webinars following the Field School (September 2021 - March 2022), to raise awareness about climate change and climate action in the Lake Superior watershed.
The team will also develop and disseminate a series of tools to catalyze and enable community-based climate action including a video series documenting knowledge and activities from the Lake Superior Climate Action Field School, a digital Lake Superior climate action storyboard, and 14 workshop modules that will be shared with community groups.
Researchers and students will share what they learn through the Lake Superior Living Labs Network website (livinglabs.lakeheadu.ca) to enhance long-term impact and develop, build, and support future climate action across the Lake Superior watershed.
The Field School is open to ages 18 and up. Details of the application process will be shared through livinglabs.lakeheadu.ca.
For more information, contact one of the co-principal investigators, Dr. Galway (lgalway@lakeheadu.ca) or Dr. Charles Levkoe (clevkoe@lakeheadu.ca), Associate Professor in the Department of Health Sciences at Lakehead University and Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Food Systems.
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Lakehead University is a fully comprehensive university with approximately 9,700 full-time equivalent students and over 2,000 faculty and staff at two campuses in Orillia and Thunder Bay, Ontario. Lakehead has 10 faculties, including Business Administration, Education, Engineering, Graduate Studies, Health & Behavioural Sciences, Law, Natural Resources Management, the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, Science & Environmental Studies, and Social Sciences & Humanities. Lakehead University’s achievements have been recognized nationally and internationally, including being ranked, once again, among Canada’s Top 10 primarily undergraduate universities in Maclean’s 2021 University Rankings; as well as included in the top half of Times Higher Education's 2020 World Universities Rankings for the second consecutive year, and 99th among 1,115 universities from around the world in THE's 2021 Impact Rankings (which assesses institutions against the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals). Visit www.lakeheadu.ca.