Mar. 05, 2008 - Issue #646: Steve Earle
Global Education
Edmonton organization lays down deep global roots in rural Alberta
“I have the power to make a change,” she says with self-assurance. “If I want to change the colour of my hair, I can change it. If I want to change the world, you can bet I’m going to change it.”
Then she casually recites a quote from Gandhi.
It’s not the image one usually has of youth who live in Alberta farming towns, where the population hasn’t quite hit 2000 people. And, as Senio explains it, the global perspective she so eloquently shares is a fairly recent development, coming as a result of an innovative global education program, sponsored by the Edmonton-based organization Change for Children, called Rural Roots.
“Rural Roots definitely changed my life. The first time I got involved was last year when I went to the youth conference. That was my first time going to a conference and I was so nervous because I had no idea what to expect. I didn’t know anybody and I was going off on my own for three days with complete strangers,” she recalls. “But once I got there, I don’t know, I felt right at home. It was, I think, because I was surrounded by a whole bunch of like-minded people and people who were enthusiastic about change and about youth being able to change the world. It was really a lot of fun.”
Senio brought the experience of the weekend home to Calmar, and she admits it was hard to settle back in after learning so much. “Coming back you realize everything that you could be doing that you aren’t and that other people could be doing but they aren’t.”
Despite feeling some alienation (“At first, a lot of people were, like, ‘What is going on with Lacy?’”), Senio and a handful of friends started a social justice club to “educate and spread awareness to the school about issues.” They organized a walk for Darfur, which saw the student body of Calmar Secondary School walking up and down the main street in Calmar, all clad in red shirts to symbolize the bloodshed that was happening half a world away.
They’re also sponsoring a young girl in Belize to ensure she is able to get an education, and Senio, who is now in grade 11, will be travelling down to the Central American country in March to “establish a relationship” with her, in advance of a reciprocal visit to Calmar in June.
It is experiences like Senio’s that have taken Rural Roots from an experiment in getting resources focused on global education—a broad term referring to non-formal, participatory education that aims to teach about global issues and the interconnection of those issues to what’s happening in our own backyards—into the hands of more rural teachers to a much-anticipated event on the annual calendar of teachers around the province in just a few short years.
“It came about because we kept hearing from teachers in Alberta, particularly rural teachers, that there weren’t enough global education resources making their way to rural communities,” explains Fiona Cavanagh, the education coordinator with Change for Children and the driving force behind the four-year-old program. “There was a real difference between urban and rural in terms of access to materials and resources.
“So the very first year Rural Roots started, that was the goal of the project: to get global education resources out and to support rural teachers in doing global education,” she continues. “There are some really amazing educators across Alberta, and we’ve learned that teachers need a lot of support if they don’t have any background on global issues or if they’ve never taught it—resources and more support and more examples of these different issues.”
Part of what providing that support entailed, says Cavanagh, was a tour of small communities to get materials into the hands of teachers and into the heads of students, followed up by a conference that brought about 90 rural and urban youth together for an intensive weekend of speakers, workshops and networking.
In the intervening years, the program, which is funded in large part by the federal Canadian International Development Agency, has continued to grow. Change for Children has now completed seven tours, reaching over 40 rural communities from Bashaw to Mayerthorpe, connecting with some 800 youth each time. The annual leadership conferences bring together an additional 100 youth each year.
And, says Cavanagh, the program continues to change as they receive feedback and ideas from interested youth and teachers, moving towards a more hands-on, participatory focus.
“Starting in the second year, it really evolved into being a lot more about really building capacity and leadership and opportunities for rural youth, so that the resources aren’t just going from the centre to the periphery. Really finding out what was happening in those communities, having leadership opportunities or conferences or tours where it wasn’t just about us going to them, but those communities doing it themselves,” she says. “So training rural youth, finding out who they are, finding out what activities existed and then providing additional ones but also additional opportunities for rural youth to find out about opportunities for going overseas or to really get involved in social justice work.”
This year, in addition to the tour of rural communities and the annual leadership conference, the project also brought a group of rural and urban youth together for four days in Edmonton for the “Change Your Lens” video workshop with local filmmaker Jaro Malanowski, which saw the youth produce short films on environmental sustainability.
While Cavanagh says that the name can be a bit misleading, since one of the program’s goals is to connect urban youth with their rural counterparts, the initial aim of taking resources to communities remains a key component of Rural Roots.
A more intensive leadership weekend for a smaller group of engaged youth is held each year in partnership with a rural community, last year travelling to Bashaw, a town of 800 in central Alberta, and this year going to Glendon, a farming town of 500 near Bonnyville.
Rheanna Morris, a counsellor at the K-12 school in Glendon, says that the fact that Rural Roots situates programs in small rural communities means a lot to the students and teachers there.
“It was really great, because we don’t get a lot of that up here,” she says with a laugh. “It’s kind of like, go to Edmonton, it’s all in Edmonton, but it’s always transportation and accommodation that costs money [and is a barrier]. So it was nice to have something more local that the kids could go to.”
And, Morris adds, the way the program was structured meant that learning was happening for all the participants.
“It was half local kids and half kids from Edmonton that Change for Children brought up. For them to see kids from Edmonton from up here, who were all like, ‘Wow, this place is so small, I could never go to a school like this!’ For those kids to even see something that was a little different … it was a wake-up for both ends, so it was really neat.”
Cavanagh, who herself grew up in a small town, says that it also shows youth from the city and the country alike that there is actually a lot happening in rural Alberta.
“One thing about this project that I think has been great is that, for a lot of rural youth—and I know myself growing up in a small rural town—it’s always ‘our town sucks or ‘this is such a hole,’” she explains. “It’s not that we can address that through this project, but we try to showcase what’s happening in rural Alberta, to highlight all these leadership programs and all the cool things that are happening instead of just saying, ‘nothing ever happens in rural Alberta.’ That’s why it’s important that the annual conference and the leadership conference is always held in rural Alberta.”
Morris has seen the impact of the program since she started taking students to the leadership conference last year, with youth in the community starting initiatives including a community recycling program, hosting hunger for change banquets and raising money to fund the building of a school in Kenya.
“It’s kind of kickstarted them to say, ‘Wow, we can really do stuff and people are going to listen to us.’ It’s been really good to just boost them up,” she enthuses.
It’s also led to ongoing collaboration with other schools in the area, and Morris will hook up with schools in nearby Bonnyville and Cold Lake to get their students down to the Mar 14-16 annual conference, being held this year in Gull Lake.
Each year, a former Rural Roots participant is invited to be the closing keynote speaker at the conference, a role that Lacy Senio will share this year with her friend Josh.
“It’ll be a year ago coming up at the end of March [when I first went to the Rural Roots conference],” Senio recalls, adding that she’s excited to share the experience she remembers so fondly with a new group of youth.
“Rural Roots did definitely change my life a lot. I find myself thinking more and more about the state of society. And I have to remember that there are a lot of global problems but there are also a lot of local problems, so you have to think how they go hand in hand, because often they do.
“I was the same person [before Rural Roots], I was always very compassionate and believed that there should be change, but I definitely know a lot more now, and I’m not afraid to really stand up to what’s going on.” V
More information on Change for Children’s Rural Roots Youth Action Project can be found online at changeforchildren.org/ruralroots/ruralroots.
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