Youth education and community outreach are two very important areas for the Redboine Watershed District, and some Project Manager Jennifer Hunnie is passionate about.
She joined Ripple Effect, presented by the Red River Basin Commission, for a conversation about those two principles, highlighting a couple of examples highlighting the Watershed in action on them.
"I think those two things are really important," she said. "When we do education, we're building future environmental stewards, and students that are going to be learning about the environment and learning to care about it. When we do our outreach with our communities we're making an impact with our wider community, and the public in general, so they can become impassioned about their environment as well."
The first is the Manitoba Envirothon. The provincial competition took place May 22nd to 24th at Camp Arnes, and the Redboine Watershed District hosted the South Regional competition ahead of it April 16th at Windmill Park in Holland.
The Manitoba Envirothon is an annual hands-on environmental education competition for high school students, designed to encourage team work, problem-solving skills, and public speaking skills while fostering an appreciation for current environmental issues.
"I'm a big fan of the Envirothon and I'm very, very happy that Redboine is extremely supportive of the program and has been for years," she shared. "We believe it's a very important program for outreach for students."
Reboine staff serve on the steering committee and help plan the Provincial competition, and have contributed to test questions in the wildlife section (which Hunnie was part of this year), trained students and volunteered as judges.
On the community outreach side of things, the Binney Water Festival just wrapped up, and the watershed is preparing to host a shelterbelt workshop in July.
"It's coming up on July 11th, and our registration is currently open for that program" sad Hunnie. "We have an arborist that's going to be out, and he's going to be offering teaching about selecting what types of trees for shelterbelts, what type of shelterbelt is best for your field, spacing and planting skills, maintenance skill. He'll give us an overview of all of that. We're actually making it really cater to the individuals, so you can let me know your land locations, we'll pull up a map, we'll sit down at a table with him, and he will go over the best options for your shelterbelt based off of your own private land.
You can register for the shelterbelt workshop here.
For more of the conversation with Redboine Watershed's Jennifer Hunnie, listen below.