Current ads
Jobs
Tenders
Notices
General

Click below

Nunavut Tourism recruits student street cleaners

“We don’t want people to remember Iqaluit with garbage everywhere”

JOHN THOMPSON

Grade 12 students pull garbage from a stream near the public health office on Wednesday, Sept. 27. From left: Connie Brick, Allison Ford and Inuusiq Akavak, with Jillian Dickens of Nunavut Tourism. (PHOTO BY JOHN THOMPSON)

---

Why? “Because no one else is doing it,” said Connie Brick, one of the 14 students, as she pulled plastic wrappers from the water.

“We don’t want people to remember Iqaluit with garbage everywhere,” she said.

The idea began several weeks ago, when Jillian Dickens, a marketing officer with Nunavut Tourism, approached one high school student with the idea.

“It’s not our role, but we saw a need, and we decided to do something about it,” Dickens said.

To graduate, each high school student needs to complete 25 hours of community service.

Usually this involves volunteering time an organization such as the crisis line, food bank, or soup kitchen.

But the idea of cleaning up the community appealed to the students who became involved because they could see immediate results, Dickens said.

After 45 minutes the stream was clean, and the students returned to the Nunavut Tourism office for a reward: cookies and hot chocolate.

The students have yet to come up with a name for their group, but they plan to develop one, along with a logo.

Once the snow arrives, the students also hope to develop ideas of how to prevent trash from being spread around town in the first place, possibly by building garbage cans that could be placed around town.

This week and next week, the high school students also plan to approach kids at Nakasuk School and Ecole des Trois Soleils, to build up an even bigger crowd to tackle the city’s garbage problem.

Atii-Go Media has agreed to create sandwich boards for the group, to encourage passers-by to “help us keep our land unspoiled,” Dickens said.

Advertising
Specs, rates,
& maps
Multi-paper
buying services
About the market
E-mail ad dept

More Information