Capture the Wind and Sun: Renewable Community Power for First Nations

In 2011 TREC Education won the Green Toronto Award for Environmental Awareness programing. With this award-winning program, TREC has successfully presented workshops to thousands of students across a wide demographic of schools in the GTA for the past 3 years. For 2012, it is my goal as a Trec Educator to be able to offer this incredible workshop free of charge to 8 First Nations schools, offering students hands-on experience with wind turbines and solar panels.
What is the workshop about and why would it help First Nation students?
The current TREC workshops are linked with the gr 5-7 and 9 level science curriculum and are between 1 to 2.5 hours in length. Students get a fun visual presentation with break out activities where they make electricity and explore the difference between renewable/non-renewable sources of energy. We discuss the seriousness of climate change and hear a true story about a pioneering young Malawian boy who built a turbine from scraps and introduced electricity to his rural village. The students spend the last half of the workshop working in small groups doing hands-on experiments using small turbines and solar panels. The students are asked to imagine themselves as solar/wind technicians who have to problem solve together to find the most effective way to make electricity. This hands-on approach has proven to be the most fun, intuitive and affective way to learn.
Some workshop adaptations for First Nations communities:
Included as an example of a successful renewable energy co-operative, I will have a section on a local community owned power project, the Pukwis Community Wind Park, which is a 20 MW wind park joint venture between the Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nation and Windfall Ecology Centre.
I will also include a section from Trec’s Green Collar Careers workshop, which will cover new job trends in the environmental energy sector of turbine, solar, geothermal and tidal technology.
The initial idea for “Capture the Wind and Sun: Renewable Community power in First Nations” project came about while visiting a good friend of mine on Walpole Island First Nations. As fellow graduates of Trent University's First Nations B.A program, we have often visited and collaborated together on ideas. I was in the process of updating her about my latest workshop developments, when my friend’s daughter cut in – “Hey, that sounds like fun, why don’t you do a little workshop for us right now? We NEVER get stuff like this at our school!” Consistently Toronto based, it hadn’t even occurred to me how little these specialized workshops get out to more remote areas.
So I spontaneously delivered an impromptu wind and solar energy workshop right there for her family. They enjoyed themselves immensely (as I conveniently had all my equipment from a previous workshop with me) so I had a miniature turbine, a solar panel and some gadgets available for my new “students” to do some experiments with. After lighting a tiny light bulb with the wind turbine, my friend’s daughter face lit up and said “Hey can you bring this workshop to OUR school? This is awesome!”
My friend agreed, saying that the First Nations schools in the area were generally underfunded in comparison to non-Native schools, especially for things like extra-curricular activities. So I promised to find a way to bring the workshop to her school. In the meantime, on request from my same friend, I delivered 2 pilot workshops at Stony and Kettle Point First Nations Hillside School while she was doing her teaching placement. The principal offered to connect me with other First Nations schools in the area, and the idea for the project took flight.
The main challenge facing the project was a lack of funds to pay for travel and expenses from Toronto. Wanting to make the project accessible and free of charge to the schools, I started looking into ways to fund the project to make it financially feasible for everyone.