Please register/RSVP by noon, April 25.
Sessions
Building Community with Food Forests
Andrew Mathis is a permaculture consultant whose past projects include food forests, four-season greenhouses, rainwater collection systems, and mushroom gardens. He has designed regenerative systems for community groups, First Nations, schools, and individuals, the largest being a 0.6-acre community food forest at St. Mary’s, Fredericton, that is open to the public and focuses on addressing food security in the area. Andrew consults through Oasis Farmery, whose mission is to design and implement regenerative systems that allow individuals and communities to provide for their needs while improving natural systems in order to create a flourishing future for all.
Andrew is also finishing his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at the University of New Brunswick. He has diplomas in University Teaching as well as Technology, Management and Entrepreneurship, and has a Permaculture Design Certification. Andrew lives with his wife Anna in an old farmhouse on 2 acres in Durham Bridge, New Brunswick with their son Gibson and daughter Juniper in the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik. Andrew has been a server and vestry member at St. Mary’s and is now serving his second term as a warden.
The Climate Crisis and its Solutions
Laura Myers is a retired teacher with over 30 years of teaching experience in Hampton. She taught primarily high school mathematics and after watching “Before the Flood” on Earth Day in 2017, she decided it was time to explicitly incorporate climate change into her math classes. The students in her grade 11 class decided they wanted to build a greenhouse and what developed after that was a sequence of events leading to the HHS greenhouse, the creation of the Climate Action Team, becoming a platinum Eco School, being featured in Canadian Geographic, building a food forest, and many other climate action initiatives. In 2019, Laura was trained as a Climate Reality Leader through the Climate Reality Project and in 2020, she started teaching Environmental Science 120. In 2022, she was awarded the 2022 Gaia Champion Teacher Award for excellence in climate action and youth empowerment. In June of 2022, she retired from classroom teaching and made climate change education her primary focus, joining Learning for a Sustainable Future as an environmental educational consultant. She helps high school teachers incorporate climate action and the Sustainable Development Goals across the curriculum.