Celebrating Climate Action in Schools and Child Care Programs Across Canada

To view the photo-rich magazine version, click here.

Originally appears in the Summer 2021 issue.

By Erica Phipps, Don Giesbrecht,
and Ian Shanahan

Each year, Healthy Schools Day presents an opportunity to galvanize a collective commitment to healthier and more sustainable learning environments for children and youth in Canada. Amidst escalating concerns about the negative impacts that the climate emergency is having on the physical health, mental wellbeing, and future prospects of today’s young people, there was little debate among the ~25 organizations and youth leaders involved in Healthy Schools Day in Canada that climate action should be the focus of the 2020–2021 campaign. 

Through our Five Ways campaign messaging and the SHARE IT | SHOUT OUT youth challenge, the Healthy Schools Day team sought to recognize and celebrate the multiple ways that students, educators, schools, and child care programs are taking action on climate change. Such actions can include things that educational professionals and young people are already doing — with or without an explicit link to climate change — such as biking or walking to school, composting, promoting litterless lunches, reducing energy waste, greening outdoor spaces, and supporting youth voices and leadership. As we learned about and tapped into the diverse array of initiatives that promote such positive actions across Canada, we became curious to know more about the extent to which such efforts are embraced and promoted by early childhood educators across Canada, and what the related motivators and barriers may be. So, we launched a brief survey via the networks of the Canadian Child Care Federation and Green Teacher to hear from educators directly about the ways in which they are incorporating climate-relevant actions into their day-to-day practice. The results of this modest effort are encouraging, if preliminary. From the ~170 early child care educators who responded to the survey, we learned the following: