Community stories

More than 60 years ago, the last Coast Salish residents of Tl'ches—the Chatham and Discovery islands off the eastern coast of Oak Bay—left to live on the Songhees Reserve in Esquimalt. But this summer, Lekwungen Coast Salish Elder Sellemah/Joan Morris, who grew up on Tl'ches, helped UVic and Songhees students in a UVic field school see the islands through their eyes—superimposing past and present.

As part of the Ye'yumnuts project initiated by Cowichan Tribes in 2017, UVic anthropologist Brian Thom and his graduate students were invited to partner with Elders, school district staff and others to commemorate an ancient ancestral site in the Cowichan Valley and to develop interpretive materials and school curriculum resources.

The UVic Peloton - Ride to Conquer Cancer team has grown to 26 members, including staff, two students, a former Chancellor Emeritus and a few community members. To date they've raised just over $62,000 for the 2018 Ride to Conquer Cancer on Aug. 25-26.

UVic Indigenous studies student Kevin Perkins is wrapping up three co-op work terms with a First Nations-run Crown Corporation that supports the revitalization of Indigenous languages, culture and heritage in BC. He’s also part of the cohort of students who pushed UVic’s co-op and career program past 85,000 co-op term placements since 1976.

Efforts by UVic geographer Dr. David Chuenyan Lai directly resulted in Victoria’s Chinatown being restored and celebrated, rather than demolished.

Community-university engagement is one of the core values at UVic and one of the top six priorities identified in UVic's Strategic Framework for 2018-23. In order to promote more effective interactions with communities and partners, the decision has been made to transition from the Office of Community-University Engagement to a new institutional approach as part of the evolution of community-university engagement at UVic.

In her past four and a half years, UVic biology undergraduate student Yamila Franco has developed an impressive list of accomplishments: achieving fluency in French, completing four co-op terms and an Honours project, learning how to code, blogging for MyUVic Life, pursuing her passion in photography and becoming a board member with the BC Chapter of the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research.

Sabrina Curtis graduates this spring with an online Graduate Diploma in Evaluation through the School of Public Administration. As the director of planning and evaluation for the Columbia Basin Trust. Curtis is applying her learning directly to her complex work of measuring the performance of many diverse community programs and strategic initiatives supported by the trust.

Margaret Fireman understands that language upholds her culture. Without language, oral traditions and wisdom passed down from her Cree ancestors would be lost. Language, she says, is closely tied to the land. And so when Fireman, a residential school survivor and then-manager of Chisasibi Heritage and Cultural Centre in northeastern Quebec, was searching for a program to bolster the preservation of her community's language of James Bay Cree, she chose carefully.

For the past three years, UVic has raised more than any other Canadian post-secondary as part of the World Partnership Walk to eradicate global poverty—this year’s walk is no exception.