After a year of meeting online, the Northern BC Climate Action Network (NorthCAN) met in person for the first time today. (Tuesday)
“All of the meetings up until today have been on Zoom because we have people all over the place, from Fort Nelson, to the Cariboo, from the Robson Valley to Haida Gwaii,” said Rob Van Adrichem, Director of External Relations of the Community Energy Association.
“It brings together people who work in local government, or in Indigenous communities, in the private sector, so we have business and industry here, other public sector, health care, education, that all have in some ways climate as part of their work, so either they’re working on low carbon solutions or they’re in transportation or buildings, anything like that. This network brings them together from communities all over Northern BC.”
Around 50 people attended the conference at UNBC’s Prince George Campus, with 40 more online.
During the conference, there was a keynote speaker from Sweden, and the rest was workshops.
“If we’re getting together in-person for the first time, let’s make that worthwhile, so this is really all about workshops, around getting people to meet each other, talking about their shared priorities, talking about their work, how they connect their work to their values to what they want Northern BC to be,” Van Adrichem said.
“That’s really what it’s about, really hands on, meeting people, because what we’ve found is that there might be one or two people in an organization that are working on climate, and so to bring them together, they get to meet each other, they get to learn from what other people are doing and that’s what this is about, collaboration and people working together to make more progress.”
Van Adrichem added today was also about charting the course for the future.
“As a result of today’s session we’ll have a sense of where-to next,” he said.
Van Adrichem said they’re hoping for more of everything, including online and in-person meetings, as well as more collaboration leading to better communities.