Join Living Lakes Canada in celebrating 2022’s International Women’s Day

For International Women’s Day, this year Living Lakes Canada would love to acknowledge three of our hardworking women team members!

Our first image here features Raegan, our Program Manager for a number of LLC initiatives including our STREAM/CABIN program. Raegan grew up on the Eastern slopes of the Canadian Rockies on Treaty 7 Territory. She received her BSc. from the University of Calgary in Environmental Science, has a certificate in Indigenous Relations Leadership, and is a Canadian Aquatic Biomonitoring Network (CABIN) certified Program Manager and Trainer. She is currently completing a Masters in Conservation Leadership at the University of Guelph and has worked with stewardship groups, Indigenous communities, academia, and environmental consultants across Canada to support biodiversity and source water protection. She currently resides in unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples in North Vancouver where she enjoys all things mountain life.

Emily is a newer member of our team and she operates as our Applied Reconciliation Coordinator. Emily is of Kashubian and Metis heritage and is originally from the Ottawa Valley on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe traditional territory. Today Emily lives on a homestead on the North Shore of Kootenay Lake outside of Nelson, BC. Emily graduated from Trent University from the Indigenous Environmental Studies program with an emphasis in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems and is enrolled in the Environmental and Management Program MA program at Royal Roads University. She also works for the City of Nelson as their Organic Waste Diversion Coordinator, and is passionate about Indigenous land reconciliation, regenerative agriculture, splitboarding, hiking, mountain biking, seed saving and living symbiotically with the land.

Finally we would like to take the opportunity on this day to appreciate our Living Lakes Canada founder and executive director, Kat Hartwig. Kat is a board member of German-based Global Nature Fund of Living Lakes International, an advisor to the Lake Windermere Ambassadors; and a member of the BC Water Leaders Consortium. She is a past advisor for the Vancouver Foundation Environment Advisory; Canadian Freshwater Alliance; and the Columbia Basin Trust Climate Resilience Advisory. Kat continues to advocate locally and internationally for land and water policy and protection mechanisms necessary to support biodiversity, source water protection, and climate resilient communities. She lives where she was born, and where she raised her daughters, by the headwaters of the Columbia River in the traditional territory of the Ktunaxa Nation and the Shuswap Band.

Thank you all so much for your work and your passion to help protect freshwater and the communities that rely on it!