Success Stories

Food security is a daily challenge in our neighbourhood. Our project teaches people from all walks of life the techniques of preserving food – as a low-cost way to enjoy local food year-round, support local farmers and build community. And it promises fresh, healthy food on the table.  Yes, we can!

The community of Crowsnest Pass is at a crossroads. Our economy is changing from one based on resource extraction to one based on tourism. Thanks to your help, we can now advocate for ecologically sustainable development.

By land and water we will escort alewife, an ecologically important river herring, during its spring run up the St Croix River where it is blocked from 98% of its spawning habitat. Alewife Run 2013 will unite alewife supporters and heighten the call for the opening of the river!

Just get outside! As our society becomes more digitally rich, we are placing less value on our natural world. The lack of connection to nature is of particular concern for children, and there is a growing body of evidence about “nature deficit disorder”.

Would you expect to find the entrance to the Delta Nature Reserve behind a hockey arena called Planet Ice? You’d assume you were lost and turn around. But, in fact, that’s exactly the way to get to Delta Nature Reserve and Burns Bog. All we need is a sign to show people they are going the right way.

“People come here because the waters are beautiful, and the waters are clean. The whales, salmon, the seal, creatures and birds all live here along our waterways. It doesn’t matter what you do in this region, you’re one or 2 steps away from benefiting from the Strait of Georgia being healthy.”

The project is to designed to develop a series non-motorized educational trails for the Waabanong Anishinaabe Interpretive Learning Centre in Manitoba, that will provide experiential learning opportunities to the public on the boreal cultural landscape and ecosystem.

Visitors from the Global South came to Canada to speak with the public, the press, and company directors and their shareholders which have operations in their countries. They addressed their concerns about mining risks and their proposals to improve, limit or cancel mining projects.

In late 2010 the Canadian Youth Home Team asked for support to engage the young people of Canada with the then upcoming United Nations Climate Change Meeting, COP16 that took place in Cancun, Mexico.

The Changing Currents program connected youth to nature through experiential learning. We empowered young people by helping them become citizen scientists, collecting important data about the health of local waterways - data that contributed to a larger ongoing environmental monitoring program.

Specially selected for Canada Water Week, the Central Westcoast Forest Society project hopes to provide training and skills in resource management, training to manage local watersheds, fishing levels and more; skills important to continue to protect this beautiful area of costal BC.

The legacy of residential schools still deeply affects First Nations communities. Many social challanges of today are the result of the traumas experinced at the schools. The Truth and Reconcilliation hearing is coming to Halifax in Oct 2011. 

Your generous support went to bursaries to allow many deserving youth to participate in a social justice youth camp which answersed the call for social justice understanding and advocacy.

This project will enable the Gwich'in Social and Cultural Institute to collaborate with individuals who accompanied Judge Berger during his Inquiry from 1974-6. A collection of historic photographs and audio tapes will travel to seven communities so residents can create photo-animations for a travelling exhibition. The GSCI will provide the Gwich'in materials with a permanent archive.

“I wrote this song Earth Revolution because I realized that the world around me was changing and that the beautiful lands that my kook-bah, my grandfather, talked about through stories of his childhood was rapidly disappearing at an alarming rate. Earth Revolution is about stepping up, about standing up, for those who have no voice such as the plants and the animals and the Earth. It’s about being the caretakers, and the stewards and the warriors and the healers for the Earth.” – Ta’Kaiya, creator of Earth Revolution Listen to her own music here!

Elk River Swim, Drink, Fish Festival is a community celebration of our watershed and an act of stewardship slated to take place around World and BC Rivers Day on September 30. We hope to also cleans up several fishing/boating staging areas 45 kilometers of shoreline and we need your help to make it happen.

17 mines. 88 advanced mineral exploration projects. 5 hydroelectric transmission lines. 182 water license applications for run-off-river-hydroelectric projects. Right now, these are all active proposals in Northwestern BC. We are facing unprecedented and accelerated industrial expansion. Our project aims to bring together leaders from 15 small, isolated First Nations for a Roundtable on Cumulative Impacts.

Environmentally destructive projects are pushing our communities to the edge – including the loss of culture and land, carcinogens, or other impacts. Climate change and environmental destruction are rationalized through systems that value the lives of some over others. You can help us develop a young generation equipped with the skills and education necessary to start a movement and create change.

3 million visitors each year are loving our cherished lake to death – and risk making the Cultus Pygmy Skulpin extinct. Our project inspires young people in our community to get creative about saving our Culuts Lake and our completely unique, native inhabitant.

The Saskatchewan Environmental Society (SES) is always amazed by how many people want to make a difference for the environment, but don't know how. We have the answer! The SES Energy Awareness Training program will help rural communities save money, energy & water resources!

Nova Scotia is the only Canadian province without a coastal Marine Protected Area (MPA). With increasing threats of overfishing, industrial development, pollution and climate change, we urgently need to take steps to protect the productive waters around the province. Through collaboration with fishermen and government, our marine program has made significant progress to advance near-shore protected area planning in Nova Scotia.

We aim to help affected First Nations persuade Yukon government to accept a Recommended Plan that would protect 80% of the pristine 68,000 square kilometer Peel Watershed. We are requesting funding to help us hire a contractor to organize public outreach for the final consultations on the plan.

This project allowed students and youth to design and install raised bed gardens for food production on school grounds, and rainwater collection systems to water the gardens. The kids in our programs are living in low-income families where food insecurity is a problem.

We are a local planning team made up of residents, service providers and businesses who are working together to improve the quality of life for people living and raising their families in our neighbourhood in Hamilton. Our aim is to establish a community garden.

Elephant Thoughts is seeking funding to expand the delivery of our multi-award winning Comprehensive Education Program in 4 communities in northern Ontario. Our programming is created with environmental conservation and preservation in mind and has proven to increase class attendance and graduation rates.  Our students receive one-on-one attention, are exposed to interactive style learning and enhance local language teaching. 

The First Nations Site C Leadership Conference brought together First Nation and Conservation leaders to discuss common dependencies on the Peace River and effective means of protecting our communities’ land, water, culture and wildlife against pending devastation which would occur should the BC government’s site C dam proposal proceed.

Our project supports the "Our Dreams Matter Too" report from the Shannen's Dream campaign to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. We will be sending First Nations youth to present the report to the UN in Geneva in February 2012 requesting inquiry into First Nations education.

Our project will cultivate creative arts with the youth who serve our organization as farmers, gardeners, and interns in our summer Cultivting Youth Leadership Program. The CYL Program has been a combination of growing and harvesting food at our farm space and community gardens, in-class horticultural training, Afrikan studies and life skills, volunteering and community engagement, cooking, and field trips.

The From Fresh From Scratch program governs all food that our club serves, feeding over 60 children and youth per night. This program also exists to educate about food and environmental impacts of our consumption. The Northern Sustainability addition will allow us to launch an interactive food education program.

A group of students suggested a mural project that would highlight student voices and identity in Gjoa Haven.  A mural project that would be facilitated by a young and inspirational northern artist. The purpose was to invigorate, empower, and participate in giving a voice for young people in the community. The school, and the gym, was the perfect place to showcase this mural, message, and identity.

GreenHere is a registered charity dedicated to increasing green space in Toronto’s Davenport neighbourhood. This project will help low income residents access fresh fruit in their communities through community harvesting. 

Growing the Future (from seed to table) is a registered afterschool environmental food education program for youth 13- 15-years-old. Youth engage in weekly hands-on activities that promote healthy nutrition and environmental sustainability while emphasizing their connection to the food system. The workshops take place in the garden and the kitchen.

Hamilton Fruit Tree Project harvests local, fresh fruit from backyards and the bounty is divided up between homeowners, volunteers and food banks. The project is a way for struggling Hamiltonians to access fresh fruit and we have different parties that come to together to make that possible, each party experiencing overlapping impacts.

The three-week land-based violence prevention workshop will allow for the healing of victims, restoration of relationships, and for the community as a whole to address the causes and effects of violence. It is a big step towards building a healthy community.

The Magpie River is one of the top 10 whitewater rivers in the world, according to National Geographic. According to Hydro-Quebec, the Magpie River is the future home of a power plant. Lend your voice in support of permanent protection for this river.

RAVEN supported the Tsilhqot'in National Government and Xeni Gwet'in First Nation in their legal action against Taseko Mines Prosperity Project which proposed to turn a pristine lake (Fish Lake) into a dump site for acid waste rock.

You have helped inspire the next generation of First Nation scientists - Thank You! Our project connected our children with our land by combining science and monitoring with stories and traditional ecological knowledge. And as our children grow, their love for our land, and their instinct to protect it, will grow with them.

A weekend-long event where teams of youth in Inuvik produce photo essays on environmental change in Canada’s Arctic Circle. BYTE would start the weekend with our photography and climate change workshops to build skills and inspire the youth to be creative; at the end, their work will be published online.

“This is intact wilderness area, a place of true beauty that hasn’t been touched by development…it hasn’t got that big scar of development, of condos, of the continual whine of engines and diesel generators.” Citizens of southeastern British Columbia have been fighting the development of a 6500 bed, 22 lift megaresort on Jumbo Creek and adjacent glaciers for over 20 years. The area is the heart of the Purcell Mountains and is home to the grizzly bear, not the place for a megaresort.

We are producing a series of videos documenting our traditional uses of our Homeland and our ongoing efforts to protect and preserve the land we have depended on since time before memory. This documentation is essential to show the world, and our future generations, what we are trying to protect.

We put this project on the Small Change Fund website because we believed that if government heard from at least 4000 New Brunswickers and Canadians, they would have to respond with improved protection of the natural areas in the Restigouche.

Keepers' Watch will provide an opportunity for all citizens along the Pembina River to address the issues of pollution and to work towards improving and enhancing the ecological health of the entire watershed.

The Québec government is embarking on a tour of three boreal regions to consult communities on 26 protected area projects. We're going on tour too! As conservation experts, we want to help make these areas as effective as possible, and work with local communities to make it happen.

  One look at Lake Winnipeg and you can see the scars of human activity on our natural world. What you don’t see is a robust recovery effort to protect the health of humans, wildlife and birds. To protect this precious land, we first need to map it. But the map is only the beginning...

The Learning Disabilities of the Yukon Summer Leadership Expedition is designed to provide real experiences that demand real decision-making. In 2010, the NOLS Yukon scholarship program received more applications and interest than available scholarships

Stories are timeless. Formats are not. In 2005, we mapped over 3,000 of the most important cultural features of our land, and connected them with stories and interviews. These help us make decisions about the use of our land. Today, it is on paper. Our project will convert our rich history into Google maps.

The CCF in partnership with the NWT Chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and NWT based Canoe North will lead an environmental education program that will culminate in a seven-day youth leadership canoe trip that will focus on the establishment of the Pehdzeh Ki Ndeh Protected Area.

Our Nation is currently building a land use plan from a grassroots approach, working closely with each of the Keyoh (family groups)in the territory. Cultural/ traditional sites and values are being collected but need to be digitally mapped, for a clearer understanding and to avoid potential conflicts.

The effects of climate change including sea level rise are greatly impacting the western coast of Cape Breton Island. This project will provide baseline mapping of past and present shorelines, beaches and tidal marshlands to identify areas most vulnerable to rising sea level and erosion. The information will inform planning.

Nameo Sipi (Ghost River) on Kistachowan (Albany River) receives 500 visitors annually. Many visitors over the years have left physical evidence of their stay in the form of discarded waste. This project will begin an annual "maintenance" program, with Elders and youth, to keep the environment healthy and safe.

The Permablitz is a social enterprise committed to improving the sustainability of our communities from cities to suburbs. Our leaders are helping to introduce permaculture to the mainstream. Empowering people and communities by facilitating the growth of a new generation of permaculture designers and practitioners.

Photovoice is used in community development, public health, and education to combine photography with grassroots social action. In our PhotoVoice Workshop, participants in Sandy Lake First Nation have a voice about issues in their community through their photographs. Together they discuss their photos, develop narratives and identify actions to take.

CKS's has been facilitating the Food Advocacy Group since the summer of 2012.  Food Advocacy Group wants to invest in a coordinator that would create a strategic plan.  Having a coordinator to take on this task will not only impact our community’s well-being but will also contribute to the empowerment of other small Yukon communities through our network relationships.

Power Shift 2012 will build an environmental and climate justice movement to transform our society. Power Shift - Arctic is being organized to bring the voices of those impacted by our changing climate to Ottawa, as well as to build roots for longer term youth organizing in the North.

The people of Atlantic Canada are working together to prevent an offshore drilling disaster from happening in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Help them to halt development that could destroy severely damage Canadian coastlines in the event of an oil spill.

The SES is working with First Nations and the general public about how the tar sands might be developed in a sustainable fashion.SES produced a 45-minute presentation on tar sands, and brought this information directly to the people

Groundswell is a community-based monitoring project that will increase the groundwater information in local communities in Nova Scotia. Groundswell is identifying groundwater observation wells, and connecting them with community groups who can actively monitor them, to establish a low-cost network to effectively monitor groundwater levels in communities across Nova Scotia.

By joining our movement to make Fisher Bay Manitoba’s next provincial park you have protected this precious land for our children, grandchildren and future generations. - THANK YOU!

“Increasingly around the world, large, intact, wilderness is disappearing. They are becoming very, very rare and because of that, they are becoming all the more precious. We are facing an unprecedented crisis on this planet. I believe that we’ve got to leave as much of nature in tact as possible. This is what we need. Large, intact areas as a hedge against our ignorance. To me, the Peel represents that.” – Dr. David Suzuki.

South Okanagan-Similkameen in British Columbia is one of the three most endangered ecosystems in Canada. Home to 57 species-at-risk! The only way to save this critically important ecosystem is the highest level of protection, which comes in the form of a national park. Despite polling that 2/3 of local residents support this, the government “requires more public support” before the park is approved. We want to educate more citizens about this project.

The Green Teens of Aamjiwnaang are a group of indigenous youth planning an exchange with youth in Fort Chip to explore questions of ‘environmental justice’. We are hoping to learn about each community’s struggles, raise awareness, and encourage youth to use creative voices and take action.

Our project is a partnership of all levels of government and community, with an emphasis on the protection and enhancement of the quality of Lake Windermere.

Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society of Manitoba is working in partnership with Mosakahiken Cree Nation to campaign for an expansion of the boundaries of the recently established Little Limestone Lake provincial park due to concerns about how recent mining exploration may affect the health of this beautiful and unique colour-changing lake. And we need your help to raise our voices.

A recommended land use plan has been released in the Peel Watershed. With your help, we were able to meet with advisors, develop support, and bring First Nation people together to develop our strategy, which we hope will be key to our success in this long struggle to protect our land.

Fundy Baykeeper, a program of the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, works to protect and ensure the ongoing health and well being of the Bay of Fundy. We urgently needed a motor to power our small boat.

We are working with community and tourism partners to achieve large scale protection of the Peel Watershed in northern Yukon. Except for a sliver in the west, the 68,042 square kilometer watershed is unroaded and pristine. We need help to rally the Yukon people to protect the Peel.

We all have memories of time spent on or near the water and those memories help to motivate our love for Canada’s waterscapes. Water bodies are an integral part of the Canadian experience. While not necessarily part of everyday life, these places help us connect to and experience nature in many ways.   We need your help to raise the voices of the lakes!

School water fountains are not made for refilling re-usable water bottles, so bottled water is purchased instead. We want to help schools turn their drinking fountains into re-usable bottle filling stations, reducing the sale of water in plastic bottles, reducing waste, and increasing the drinking of healthy water in schools all across Nova Scotia.

Inuit identity rests within the strong relationships we have with the land, and the stories that link historic use of specific sites. Loss of this relationship leads to loss of respectful stewardship of these sites. Arviat Elders are anxious to ensure that place names are used and stories behind the names are recorded and they need your help.

A generation ago, our people stopped a gas pipeline on the Mackenzie River. Today our children and grandchildren want to document our struggle for our land before the historical record disappears.  You're generosity will now bring six people who changed our history 35 years ago on a journey down the river in a freighter canoe, to connect youth with the inspiring and insistent action of their ancestors. THANK YOU!

River Run 2012 will raise awareness within Ontario about the continuing affects of industry on the Boreal forest ecosystem and the Grassy Narrows community in Northern Ontario. Community members will travel to Toronto for a week of public awareness-raising events concerning mercury poisoning and clear cutting within the Boreal forest and we need your support.

Once upon a time, there was a very special Raven… A Raven named Rocky with incredible powers. Rocky used his powers to stop the Raven coalmine from destroying his homeland in the Comox Valley.

For 30 years, the Bell-Irving Hatchery was a hub of community activity, offering popular environmental education and stewardship programs and providing salmoids for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans classroom programs. Today, it has been condemned. We wish to undertake a community-wide awareness campaign to save the Hatchery. Over 10,000 students each year will lose the hands-on experiences they have enjoyed here without action.  The Hatchery gets youth involved in environmental issues, teaching them about the environment and helping them become leaders for tomorrow.

Our name means “the river people”. We are raising our voice in opposition to developing an open pit mind on our land and on the shores of our beloved waterways. Fish Lake is part of the Fraser River watershed, home to the largest salmon habitat in Canada. Taesko Mines Limited wants to build a mine here, turning our fresh water lakes into toxic waste dumps.

The Adams River Sockeye Salmon Run is unique in the world. Every four years there is a big run, and people from across the country and around the world come to Roderick Haig Brown Park to witness nature’s greatest story – the return of the sockeye salmon.

With your support, Carrier and Sekani Elders and Youth walked portions of a proposed Enbridge Gateway pipeline route to learn about environmental impacts and voice concerns. Thanks to your help we are now able to produce a DVD to capture the journey and use as a public outreach and media tool in the overall fight to stop the tar sands oil pipeline. 

PAA plans to raise awareness of natural and cultural values of protected areas in general, and specifically Eagle River, through a series of targeted school visits in Labrador, presentations/workshops in local communities, and collecting signed letters from the public and students to deliver to the provincial government.

We would like to send some youth to BC to receive film training for two weeks, and bring them back to the community to use the skills they have learned and working in the same field. They would be working with the CART team to develop Tlicho videos.

Small Change Fund donors helped to protect the culture and language of the Tlicho people of the Northwest Territories by supporting the creation of a summer jobs program which focussed directly on transferring land skills and traditional knowledge from Tlicho Elders to Tlicho youth.  Thank you!

The Permaculture Project GTA (TPPGTA) thanks Small Change for awarding us the Microgrant in the amount of $3215 for our upcoming Convergence Event called Toronto Spring Convergence 2013 April 26, 27, 28 2013. The Toronto Spring Convergence 2013 is an annual event organized by The Permaculture project GTA’s Toyin Coker and team to be three days of training and guided action in Toronto wrapped up with a Market of organic foods and goods on the final day. Inviting Toronto’s Changemakers to an information sharing and strategic ation weekend, we celebrate our achievements in implementing sustainable projects and engagement advancements in the GTA. By offering two days of workshops and training we at TPPGTA are introducing changemakers to our leadership action program bootcamp style. While carrying out highly crafted actions around the GTA, participants will learn new skills around facilitating future actions with their local groups that are safe, informed and influential. We will explore advanced activities in urban gardening like building cold frames, sheet mulching, using rainbarrels, chicken farming, bee keeping/honey production, composting and more. We thank Small Change Fund for helping us to ensure there will be threed ays this spring where change makers will converge at TPPGTA’s HeadQuarters for Workshops, Healthy Organic Food, Hands on activities and networking with other change makers while implementing a number of greening projects in the City. 

Pelee Island Bird Observatory (PIBO) recognizes that the most successful organizations have a strong strategic (business) plan that engages their staff and Board, and thanks to your support we can invest in this process.  Thank you!

The goal of the Tusaqtuut project was to gather Inuit Core Knowledge from our elders and ensure that their irreplaceable knowledge is promoted, protected, and maintained for generations to follow. Thank you for helping make this possible.

Our Urban Roots Youth program trains 20 youth in urban agriculture in a season. Youth summer staff and volunteers will be installing new and maintaining currently installed rainwater catchment systems in 3-4 school garden locations, training themselves and residents in various techniques for rainwater harvesting and garden water conservation methods.

Music. Dancing. Storytelling. Our 5-day Drum Dance Festival celebrated the diversity of our people, connected us to each other, our shared history and what makes us different. You helped us preserve our stories and history.  THANK YOU

Women on water brings women of all ages together out on their local rivers. Women learn white water skills while building self-esteem, inspiring and encouraging one another and learning about local environmental issues and threats to their watershed. You can help build the emotional and physical health and strength of women – mothers, grandmothers, aunts, cousins and sisters.

The youth council of Fort Severn Cree First Nation are planning outings on the land where Elders can teach youth about traditional skills in the language to learn conservation.

  Have you ever wondered if we are getting a complete picture of Canada’s oilsands? So have we. Our project is a documentary film – a 3-year journey across Western Canada to explore and expose the world’s thirstiest oil industry.

The Summit is designed for Northern youth to network with others to increase social engagement on climate change issues. The focus will be on developing leadership skills and exploring storytelling as a tool for social change, with skill-building workshops and engaging hands-on activities.

Community elders and traditional knowledge holders taught our youth how to build traditional log cabins on our land.  The cabins will be used to keep alive our Anishinaabe culture and teachings, while the empowered youth will become leaders in our fight to protect the land from big corporations.

In order to promote literacy and wellness, our project will put a Free Little Library in each rural Yukon community. Each library will be located in a neutral location (e.g. Post Office or First Nation's Office) and will help promote environmental sustainability and connection to the land by strengthening community through an act of sharing knowledge and increasing peoples abilities to understand current issues concerning the environment.