Power to the people program tv#

“It’s a beacon of hope and change,” says Laboucan. Meanwhile, the Pitapan solar project is generating more than power. Participants at the event included more than 100 organizations, from Greenpeace to Unifor, a union representing 40,000 oil and gas workers among its 300,000 members. “It will affect everything about our lives if we don’t do something about it,” she says. “The climate change problem is the issue of our civilization,” Fonda told the Toronto Star. They met last summer while taking part in a March for Jobs, Justice and the Climate just prior to Toronto hosting the Climate Summit of the Americas.

Power to the people program tv#

Jane Fonda, 77, two-time Oscar-winning film actor, TV star, former fitness guru and activist, helped sponsor Laboucan’s project. “There are plans for an even larger project to generate more clean energy and revenue for the community,” says Laboucan. The project powers a health centre with excess flowing into the community’s energy mix. Today, Little Buffalo is home to an inspiring 80-panel solar project that generates 20.8 kilowatts of energy. Their process included community consultation, fundraising, scouting out suitable locations, deciphering complex electrical configuration methods, safety planning, construction and dealing with a range of challenging issues that came up along the way. With her degree complete and her plan in place, Laboucan gained the support of her community to begin the Pitapan solar energy project in the summer of 2015. “I wanted to see what solutions actually looked like, to show others that making these changes are possible.” She knew about the IGov program at UVic-a blended program of online learning and on-campus sessions that allowed her to work and stay connected to home and family-and chose it as her incubator. “The more than 2,600 oil wells on Lubicon territory make it difficult to live a healthy, traditional and sustainable lifestyle.”Īfter years of speaking out, Laboucan wanted to stop fighting and start building something positive.

Yet my family still goes without running water,” Laboucan told the Breaking Ground delegation in 2012, a reporting arm of the Nobel Women’s Initiative. “Since 1978, over $14 billion has been taken out of our traditional territory. Having grown up in the shadow of one of the largest oil and gas extraction plants in the world-the Alberta tar sands-Laboucan has shared her eyewitness account of the impact the oil industry has had on her Indigenous community. “IGov asked me, ‘What can we do? What can we bring?’ All I could think about was that my people are in crisis, that was my impetus.” With access to the space and framework she needed to push her project forward, Laboucan created a plan to realize her vision for the solar project. She knew what she wanted to do, but admits she didn’t know how. And I am really pleased by how they enabled me.” Laboucan says of her IGov profs, “These are men who support modern-day change that embraces the very nature of our Indigenous communities. “As I see it, this is a grassroots project where Indigenous governance, sustainability and resurgence converge-and it's being done on the community's terms without government money.” “Melina’s work embodies the leadership and governance practices that our program promotes,” says Corntassel, IGov director. But they were open to her plan and highly supportive in helping her see it through. “They hadn’t seen my kind of project before,” she says of her professors, Drs. Melina Laboucan, a 33-year-old member of the Lubicon Cree First Nation, came to UVic’s Indigenous Governance (IGov) master’s program in 2013 with a clear purpose: to develop a solar energy project plan that would tackle Indigenous and environmental issues in her home town of Little Buffalo, Alberta.