by Student Affairs Practitioner and Master’s of Higher Education Candidate, Joanne Cedan A few years ago, I spent the entire summer biking along Toronto’s Waterfront Trail. Slowly, I expanded my route by biking throughout the city on major roads. There was one day where my tire blew out on broken glass. Caught by surprise, I…
by Olivia Allen, Project Lead for Youth Programs In my last contribution to the Cautious Optimist Project,I shared about my experience with starting seedlings and planting many fruits and vegetables in my garden! As you’ll read in the last blog, I was a little overwhelmed with the amount of plants I had started, pots everywhere,…
By: Felicity Feinman, A Youth Advisory Board Member from 2018-2019 Will foraging help us survive the climate crisis? In preparing this blog and going on a foraging trip, I found myself having many imaginary conversations with Danielle in my mind. This is a question I wish I could ask her. “For every month this year,…
by Haley Friesen, Youth Advisory Board Member 2019-2020 Although I never had the opportunity to meet Danielle Moore, I feel as though I did. I believe this is a true testament to keeping her spirit and message alive. Before writing and starting on my project, I read Danielle’s blog, in which she wrote “It’s important…
by Sydney Stevenson, Youth Programs Assistant “Want to go fishing?” is the phrase that starts my summer every year. My brother Kieran is an avid fisherman, and a very skilled one at that. Since he was 3 and caught his first bass off the edge of the rocks in Georgian Bay, fishing has stuck. Since…
By Lily Falk, Waterlution Youth Programs Assistant – Lily Falk is working with Waterlution this summer to help kick-start Young Water Speaks, our new youth water storytelling contest. It’s late summer 2014 and I’m walking in a scrubby, birch forest in the Swedish Arctic, watching my new friend Mikael jump around the woods collecting mushrooms.…
By Olivia Allen, Project Lead for Youth Programs About a year ago, when the Youth Advisory Board decided to carry forward the Cautious Optimist Project in memory of the wonderful Danielle Moore, my heart was warmed. The fact that the project was envisioned, designed and launched by Danielle, along with how deeply it resonated with…
By Melissa Dick with support from Ally Dick It’s been a few years now that I’ve wanted to learn to make my own soap. I would start looking up instructions and recipes, and get overwhelmed by the seeming complexity, and also intimidated by warnings of working with some ingredients. I had talked about it with…
By Kirsten Mathison & Olivia Allen Kirsten Mathison was a volunteer Youth Advisor and storybook author in Waterlution’s 2018/19 YAB cohort. Olivia Allen is Waterlution’s Project Lead for Youth Programs. KM: These days, optimism and building life-skills feel more important now than ever before. There is no way that Danielle could have known that a…
By Charlene Claudio At the beginning of last year, when Danielle first shared her concept of The Cautious Optimist project, I had immediately taken quite an interest (although, it took me an entire year to find time to listen to the podcast she had recommended about preparing for a climate apocalypse!) But also within the…
