A Child’s Right to a Healthy Environment

A Child’s Right to a Healthy Environment – Lessons Learned from an Intergenerational Approach

There has been a growing interest in finding ways to work effectively across generations to address complex and entrenched issues. With COP26 complete, the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation are complex issues on the top of some people’s minds. This session seeks to explore what it really means for children and adults to come together as partners in understanding and working towards a child’s right to a healthy environment.

Through dialogue, we will explore the strengths, the challenges, and the areas for development to make this as effective as possible, using the recent example of the Phoenix Consultation, a North American Consultation on Children’s Right to a Healthy Environment case example. We will explore an expansive approach to intergenerational work, including youth-adult partnerships, as well as youth-only spaces and adult-only spaces that weave together ideas and action for change. In looking at different intergenerational approaches, we will collectively explore the benefits and messy challenges of each. 

Meet our speakers,

Albert Lalonde (MC) is a climate justice activist based in Tiohtià:ke-Mooniyang (Montreal), on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka land. They work as a communication and mobilization consultant at the David Suzuki Foundation, and study law at Université du Québec à Montréal. They are a founding member and co-spokesperson for “Quebec”’s Student Coalition for Socio-Ecological Change (CEVES), a union of the highschool, college and university groups leading climate justice strikes throughout the province since 2019. 

Prof. Jessica Taft is Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. As an interdisciplinary youth studies scholar, her research focuses on the political lives of children and youth across the Americas, with an emphasis on youth activists and youth social movements. Her writing draws from intersectional feminism to illuminate how age functions as an axis of power and inequality in complex relation with other social differences. In her scholarship and practice, she seeks to foster more egalitarian intergenerational partnerships that increase young people’s power in their communities and the world.

Simran Sarwara is a racialized settler from Ambala, Punjab in Northern India who has been settled on the stolen and occupied Coast Salish territories of the xwməθkwəy əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səlílwəta (Tsleil-Waututh) nations for 19 years. She is interested in building her capacity in relation to process-based and ‘translation’ work to support folks to do what they do best! She works as the Youth Programming Co-Lead & Organizational Strategist at PeerNetBC, and as the Administrative Assistant at the International Institute for Child Rights & Development. She is currently completing her MEd in Contemplative Inquiry & Approaches in Education at Simon Fraser University. She is passionate about curriculum, peer-based education, and applying anti-oppressive and intersectional analyses to all the roles she fills in both personal and professional contexts.

Rebeccah Nelems (she/her) is Associate Faculty at the School of Leadership, Royal Roads University. Her work is on eco-social empathy, relational leadership, decolonizing and participatory research. As a scholar practitioner, she works with young people, communities and organizations at the local, national and global levels. She is a sixth generation settler of Irish descent living on the traditional lands of the Xwsepsum and lək̓ʷəŋən families and ancestors, on the Northwest coast of Turtle Island also today known as Vancouver Island.

Martha Pitre (she/her) is a B.A. student at the Frank McKenna School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. When not providing research and admin support at the IICRD, Martha is probably exploring the NB trails or playing her fiddle.

Vanessa Currie is the Executive Director of the International Institute for Child Rights and Development, a Canadian-based charity working to support children and their families impacted by adversity to lead in creating transformative solutions to the issues they face. She has spent the last two decades working in children’s rights with a focus on children’s participation in their protection. Vanessa uses participatory research approaches to explore challenging situations together with young people and their intergenerational allies that help create sustainable solutions. 

William Myers MPA, Ed.D. has spent much of his professional career addressing international child protection issues. He is retired from the United Nations, where he served with UNICEF and the International Labour Office, where he developed particular interest in the issues of protecting working and street children. He is he author or coauthor of various scholarly books and articles on these topics. He also had a parallel career in the U.S. and abroad in socially and ecologically sustainable rural development. These two lines of interest have come together in his current focus on children, youth and intergenerational collaboration in the growing global climate emergency, in which he is involved as both activist and academic. He has long been associated with IICRD, twice serving as President of its board of directors and currently as a Board Director.

Silvia Yoselín Hernández Basurto is a member of the Intergenerational Advisor Committee in the Phoenix Consultation and Project Manager in naj hub, a youth-led civil society association to empower children and youth in Mexico. Her work in naj hub is focused on training people to lead sustainable projects in a dynamic, fun, and effective way for everyone, especially children and youth. In 2021 she was a coordinator of the initiative “Juventudes Transformando México” (Youth Transforming Mexico) on a national level, in collaboration with CEMEX, UN Global Compact Mexico and YZ Proyectos.Since 2020 she is an allied member of RedLAtM (Red Latinoamericana de Ciencias Atmosféricas y Meteorología), a Latin American Network in Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology. In 2020, in collaboration with Mexico’s Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources, she took part in the update of Mexico’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC).

This event is co-sponsored by the International Institute for Child Rights and Development and Royal Roads University and is a part of a three-part series.