If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere!
Amazing Tutors' Eco-Health Giving Club Promotes Eco-friendliness
"We look forward to working together championing issues that are important to wildlife conservation, climate change, elimination of single-use plastics, biodiversity, saving trees and habitats, banning the captivity of cetaceans, and the health of our oceans."
Amazing Tutors' Eco-Health and Giving Club captures the connection among healthy functioning ecosystems and the benefits of nature. We celebrated this year's charitable ecological-health giving by cleaning up two acres of forested area behind Princess Margaret Secondary. As part of the Summer Sparkle Program, we invite students to plant flowers, clean and remove garbage. We carefully recycled, removed and sorted waste from the forest trails. Our Eco-Health Giving Club was designed as part of our Community Outreach Program to create volunteer opportunities and environments that foster our students' ability to participate in a caring, giving and supportive community. The aim was to grow our team-spirit while giving back to our community. Our integrated, hands-on Eco-Health Giving Club works in conjunction with our Eco-Friendly Harvest Giving Club which featured recycled, reclaimed, re-purposed, thrifted and upcycled supplies and items to encourage waste minimization and reuse strategies. It goes a long way in helping keeping students proud of their school community.
Where Has all the Wilderness Gone?
BC's spotted owls rely on old-growth forests to forage, nest and roost. The loss of this habitat has collapsed their population to fewer than six owls in Canada's wilderness today. They are among many wildlife species threatened by habitat loss, toxic insecticides, logging, pollution, and climate change --- but what is the real killer of wildlife in Canada?
The World Wildlife Federation (WWF) reports that the populations of all wildlife species on Earth have declined by an average of 60% between 1978 and 2018. The situation is even more dire in Canada, as roughly half of all wildlife species in Canada had their population diminish by an average of 83% between 1970 and 2014. Our wilderness is continuing to shrink at a rate unprecedented since the great Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction 66 million years ago, when 75% of all of Earth's flora and fauna (including the last dinosaurs) went extinct. Later, mega fauna like mammoths, saber-toothed cats, and giant sloths disappeared soon after humans arrived in the Americas 13,000 years ago. Paleoecologist Paul Martin's Blitzkrieg Hypothesis suggests humans created havoc as they spread through the Americas, wielding spears to annihilate animals that never before faced a technological predator. Fortunately, this extinction was not exhaustive. North America kept its black bears, deer, smaller bison, etc., while South America kept its jaguars, llamas etc.
The countries with the most remaining wilderness today are Russia, Canada, Australia, Canada and Brazil, in that order. Together these five nations house 70% of the remaining global wilderness and biodiversity today. Canada's position as a "champion of the wilderness" may sound reassuring, but the reality is far more chilling. While most of our and agriculture development is clustered around the 49th parallel, the natural exploration, resource exploitation, and infrastructure that supports our cities' rapid growth extends all over our would-be wilderness. Something has to give, but what, and at what cost?
Human activities often detrimentally affect nature. Canadians currently rank among Earth's highest per capita energy consumer and disproportionately impact our wilderness. The state of Canadian ecosystems can be measured by the direct impact of projects like the Athabasca Tar Sands Project, Site C Dam, and Trans Mountain Pipeline, and also by the rapid disappearance of wildlife accompanied by an increase in incompetent after-the-fact crisis management. As with spotted owls, caribou populations across Canada are collapsing. This is largely due to decades of extensive forestry and oil and gas extraction and not by natural hunting for survival as conducted by First Nations People for millennia.
Orcas are intelligent social mammals that pass survival information across generations in Pacific Northwest Oceans. They are surrounded by toxic contaminants, face supply changes, and are continually bombarded with noise from vessels. These are major factors declining their numbers, with Orcas dying due to boat strikes, malnutrition, starvation, and toxins. At a crucial time when Orcas' future hangs in doubt following the Chinook salmon population collapse and intensified ship traffic, oil tanker traffic is set to increase sevenfold. Half of the Orcas' will perish within a decade.
Perhaps the most publicly recognized endangered species in Canada are our polar bears, which are declining in the face of climate change shrinking available ice and their food supply alike. The decline of polar bears, caribou, and Orcas are merely the most wildly publicized concerns. This begs the question, can we expect to have healthy wildlife living in a disturbed and increasingly threatened and ecologically unhealthy wilderness? Canadians take it all with a grain of salt when the general attitude is that "they are too expensive to save." Moreover, half of BC's salmon populations have been found to be endangered by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSWIC). Due to mismanagement, we have overfished the oceans and polluted spawning grounds.
The real culprit is humanity's dramatic population growth. We are turning rural landscapes into vast unsustainable suburbia. Our negative encounters are a symptom of an unhealthy environmental condition driven by mankind when we press into areas inhabited by wildlife. We do the greatest harm when we encroach directly into wild habitats by spraying insecticides, uprooting trees and poisoning water. We must learn to manage our own behavior and its associated wilderness destruction; otherwise we'll be even more destructive than our ancient spear wielding ancestors. Where should our priorities lie? We must begin protecting Earth's environment, life, and resources. This is a collective responsibility for all who inhabit this planet. We must be good stewards on Earth and minimize our negative impact. We must reduce our consumption and properly dispose of our waste. We must replace the resources we consume whenever possible and protect the wildlife and habitats threatened by human activity and the changing climate alike.
Our Eco-friendly Program
Maintaining and enhancing the integrity of ecosystems and other natural features is essential for ensuring that local neighbors continue to benefit from the ecosystem services that contribute to our collective well-being and prosperity for all living organisms and friendly wildlife. There is no substitute for hard work to remove litter, plant trees, or to reduce and take plastic packaging back to the store that sold the items. We can implement eco-friendly strategies to minimize impacts on the environment, build stronger connections to community and family, forge bonds of trust, and teach self-improvement and accountability. Our guiding principles recognized that each community has unique characteristics, knowledge, experience and expertise to address prevention and early intervention for vulnerable youth. Criteria included providing integrated and collaborative services that support community capacity to build healthy relationships. Essentially, these are the core principles we impart in our programs designed to provide leadership training. We encourage our students to reflect on their interactions, to help them understand the value of caring, compassion, empathy, and to use their new awareness to help in the communities they live in. We follow a micro eco-health framework which encapsulates our efforts around ecological health and provides guiding principles, goals, and strategies to help achieve the vision of a greener, beautiful, healthy, and resilient environment for current and future generations. Students and youth help the environment while being trained in local ecological stewardship. We can work with different organizations and help renew trails, enhance local wildlife habitats and park features, plant and identify flowers and trees, monitor wildlife, and build gardens. Our micro ecological health framework sets the following high-level goals for ecological health to guide our Amazing Tutors' volunteering actions.
- Ecology goal 1: Build ecological resilience and minimize impacts
- Ecology goal 2: Protect natural areas and conserve ecosystem services
- Ecology goal 3: Nurture nature within communities
- Ecology goal 4: Integrate Biophilia and the health benefits of nature in decision making
Most families now live in cities, and we spend nowhere as much time outside as the Aboriginal and pioneers of Canada. This trend to urbanization accelerated in the second half of the 20th century in developed countries where food production slowly became mechanized. Although this has been seen as desirable progress, our migration away from nature has had adverse mental and physical health effects. Our Community Outreach Program teaches that Biophilia is an innate feeling of caring and affiliation for living entities on the planet and it is important to be a good steward in our local communities and our planet. Our Community Outreach Program in our Youth Zone is facilitated by our Youth Group team with the goal of supporting those in a positive youth and community leadership role to develop the life skills and confidence to identify and safeguard people who may be at risk of juvenile delinquency. Both of our Eco-Health Giving and the Eco-Harvest Giving Clubs are designed to help build awareness for environmental protection and reduce the risk factors associated with juvenile offenders. We support the development of our students' emotional intelligence and we teach skills that strengthen students' ability to learn, have empathy, manage emotions, and solve problems. We base the skills and concepts taught on research that connects the development of social-emotional competence and self-regulation skills to success in school and life. The ecological health wheel outlines the different ecosystem services.
Our North West Coast Ecosystem is a dynamic complex of plant, animal and microorganisms and their nonliving environment interacting as a functional unit. Ecosystem services are the benefits local neighbors obtain from ecosystems. These services can be grouped into four main types as outlined by Metro Vancouver:
- Provisioning services include material and energy outputs from ecosystems, including food, fresh water, and raw materials used for construction and energy like wood.
- Regulating services refer to the services provided by ecosystems in processing and assimilating pollution, stabilizing water flows and soil erosion, control local climates, and storing or sequestering carbon.
- Cultural services are the non-material benefits people obtain from ecosystems through spiritual enrichment, cognitive development, recreation, and aesthetic enjoyment.
- Supporting services underpin all other ecosystem services. Ecosystems provide habitats for all plants and animals while depending on a diversity of species and maintain their own functions.
At Amazing Tutors Children's Foundation, the Community Outreach workshops fosters a caring, learning and safe environment where discussions are openly encouraged. Students and participants learn how to communicate effectively with one another. We help our students develop critical thinking skills, problem solving, simple conversation and conflict resolution skills. We covered a range of current issues and incidents which have an effect on cohesion and multi-cultural integration. We analyzed initiatives including event planning, fundraising, environmental protection, community outreach and research.
We can help students develop their sense of the world through positive conversations with important adults in their lives. We can use our language carefully to help students learn to view themselves and others as strong individuals, free to choose their own paths. Every student should take time to visit and reflect upon his or her experience. We encourage all students to discover their unique potential.
A Kind Word from an Amazing Student
"For the last one year that I have been teaching at Amazing Tutors, I have also been working towards my Environmental Protection Technology Diploma at KPU. As a former student of Amazing Tutors, I have been accustomed to the effective values and techniques that tutors have been sharing to support and help their students succeed. These values and techniques have shaped me to become a better student and had motivated me to learn and experience more complex and interesting concepts. This led me to become a student of the Science faculty. I believe that during my time at Amazing Tutors as a student, I was mentored and received a large amount of support and encouragement in my studies, which helped me become more interested in the field of environmental science. Please go confidently in the direction of your dreams and live the life you have imagined."
-S. Toor, ( An Environmental Protection student at Kwantlen Polytechnique
University) He is the recipient of the District/Authority Scholarship. This scholarship is distributed across school districts and independent school authorities that recognize graduating B.C. students for excellence in their chosen area of interest or strength such as indigenous languages and culture, fine arts,applied design, skills, and technologies, physical activity, international languages, community service (volunteer activity) or technical and trades training. Winners receive an one thousand scholarship voucher to use towards their post-secondary tuition.
"It is important for children and students to have access to mentors in their communities. When children have access to mentors in their communities, they gain a sense of belonging and connection. These relationships allow children exposure to new opportunities and perspectives to help expand their understanding of relationships and the world around them. Additionally, sharing personal connections with positive role models enables children to reach their full potential and provides them positive reinforcement of their strengths, which naturally contributes to increases in a child's self-esteem. Community-based mentors also aid in reducing social isolation and expanding a child's relationship skill set, allowing for genuine personal connections where the child can feel valued and secure and transfer those skills into other avenues of their lives."
-B. Varty ( Big Brothers of Greater Vancouver)
For more informative resources, please see the following sites:
Use this Labour Market Navigator link to find out which jobs are in demand and where in B.C.
www.workbc.ca/jobs-careers/explore-careers.aspx
Press the Educational Planner link to find out which program, school or path is right for you.
http://www.educationplannerbc.ca/
Click on this Industry Training Authority link to discover opportunities for youth apprenticeship.
http://www.itabc.ca/youth
Amazing Tutors Children's Foundation's Youth Leadership Development Program
At Amazing Tutors' Children's Foundation, we are very gratified for the depth and breadth of community support. Through our Youth Leadership Development Program, we have delivered over one thousand shelter food packs to various shelters and charities in Surrey and Vancouver. Our Youth Leadership Development Program facilitates the personal growth and leadership development in youths. We empower our youth to learn valuable leadership and life skills through a variety of diverse, spiritual experiences, peer engagement and active community. Students earn school service credits. We focus on charitable works, community outreach and service activities, education, fundraising and organized sports. Our directors emphasize the importance of leadership through education and teamwork and our programs build and instill confidence, cooperation, discipline, hope, and high self-esteem.
Our Youth Leadership Development Program challenges youths to take on a leadership role both in life and in their caring community. We integrate participants into our organization's decision making body and volunteer programs. Additionally, we strive to offer the skills and competitive edge required for personal, relational and successful community growth. Through our Youth Development Leadership Program, our students and participants use hands-on learning to develop youth-to-adult and peer-to-peer relationships based on compassion, engagement and social awareness. We offer skills training workshops in the following areas: communication, community, co-operation, environmental sustainability, global awareness, leadership, and self-awareness. For more information about our tutoring and volunteering programs, please contact us today. We welcome your inquire.