Alberta Ecotrust Foundation
Suite 250, 305 10 Avenue SE
Calgary, Alberta T2G 0W2

P: 403.209.2245
Toll Free: 1.800.465.2147

Charitable Registration No. 13502 9825 RR0001

The community-led Building Resilience and Knowledge Sharing Project is a partnership between the Oldman Watershed Council, Blood Tribe Land Management, Piikani Nation Land Management, and Cows and Fish. The initiative is focused on restorative action to support cultural revival, boost resilience to climate change, improve access to quality water, and enhance biodiversity. The project will restore key grassland and riparian ecosystems and will build the capacity of partners to braid Niitsitapi knowledge and western science together. 

Oldman Watershed Council

Community Resilience and Knowledge Sharing

Goodwill Industries of Alberta accepts donations to sell at their thrift stores.  They often receive donations of damaged or undesirable items that cannot be sold. Through their Goodwill@Work program, Goodwill hopes to establish Cleaning Cloth, and Repair for Good programs at their impact centre in Calgary. Both programs will upcycle and recycle items thereby diverting material from landfill. In 2021, 6700 kg of textiles and 9500 kg of furniture were diverted from the landfill through these programs in Edmonton. This grant will help Goodwill replicate this successful program in Calgary.

Goodwill Industries of Alberta

Through this project NCC will offer technical, financial, and logistical support to secure Indigenous Protected Conservation Areas (IPCAs) in Alberta. The Métis Nation of Alberta (MNA) has developed a land securement and stewardship strategy in consultation with their Citizens and are exploring opportunities. NCC will share data and logistical capacity in support of MNA’s conservation plans, accelerating the rate of conservation. NCC is eager to support the formation of IPCAs and other Indigenous-led conservation projects. To meet this challenge NCC will also undertake the necessary fundamental changes to their operations to ensure projects and activities are aligned with reconciliation and build out their capacity to do this work.

Nature Conservancy of Canada

Capacity Building for Alberta's Indigenous-led Conservation Future

The Circular Innovation Council will develop a solution to recover the value of organics and rescue consumable foods from the IC&I sector.  Through food rescue and food waste processing, this pilot will consolidate and connect food and food waste collections between neighbouring businesses and institutions and also develop an affordable cost-shared collective financial model. Outcomes and guidance from the pilot will be shared, replicated, and scaled across Alberta and Canada.  The solution will rescue nutritious food to community agencies addressing food insecurity, reduce food waste and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with it, produce valuable compost, and reduce organic diversion costs for businesses and institutions.

Circular Innovation Council

Circular IC&I Food Recovery and Waste Diversion Pilot

Frog Lake First Nations (FLFNs) and its partners will work collaboratively with the community, including knowledge keepers, Elders, youth, women and 2SLGBTQQIA+ members, to develop a Food Sovereignty Strategy.  Frog Lake First Nations members have indicated food sovereignty is an important undercurrent to address as FLFNs seeks to reinvent its economy as one that is circular and sustainable for generations to come. Deliberate and coordinated efforts will be made to revitalize FLFNs’ traditional food economy, ramp up local sustainable food production, remediate environmental deficiencies and more.

Frog Lake First Nations

CPAWS Northern and Southern Alberta chapters will leverage momentum and attention on Alberta’s Eastern slopes built by their previous work on coal and parks to increase organizational and community capacity to holistically address the multiple environmental threats facing this key ecosystem. The Eastern Slopes are an environmentally and socially vital landscape with overlapping importance for water, biodiversity, carbon storage, cultural and recreational values, yet these values also face multiple overlapping threats such as forestry, and increasing recreation pressures. This project will protect this key ecosystem through a multi-pronged approach using policy expertise and engagement, empowerment of community groups to get involved in land use decisions, and advance understanding around the practice of landscape scale conservation.

Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society

Holistic Conservation of Alberta’s Eastern Slopes: Phase 1

Keepers of the Water have created educational resources for schools and communities that can serve as teaching tools on the importance of biodiversity in Northern watersheds. Their Community Based Water Monitoring Program - Multimedia Interactive Map Project will expand their strategic communications capacity, assert Indigenous sovereignty, and bridge the data vacuum created by Canadian policymakers. KOW’s work begins with grassroots water monitoring of the Athabasca River, heavily impacted by coal, pulp and paper industries and the oil sands region extraction projects.  This ambitious campaign initiated in May 2022 will look to the future to continue data collection. The project will advance knowledge of impacts to sacred watersheds to uphold commitments to elevate decolonized traditional Indigenous water governance which can be accomplished by emphasizing Indigenous land-based knowledge, language and culture.

Keepers of the Water Society

Keepers of the Water Community Based Water Quality Monitoring Program

 Launched by Rural Routes to Climate Solutions (a Stettler Learning Centre initiative) in 2021, the Siksikaitsitapi Agriculture Project (SAP) is an equity, diversity and inclusion project connecting Siksikaitsitapi agricultural producers and traditional harvesters with the resources, traditional knowledge and peers to engage with and implement culturally appropriate agricultural climate solutions. The Siksikaitsitapi (‘Blackfoot Confederacy’ in the Blackfoot language) consists of Kainai, Piikani and Siksika First Nations. This second year of the project will organize and facilitate community convening (e.g., meetings, workshops, field days) for Siksikaitsitapi members to learn about agricultural climate solutions and discuss and explore where they intersect with traditional knowledge, food security and community health.  

Stettler & District Adult Learning Council

Reducing emissions and addressing climate change will require many different approaches working together. One approach that's been used for decades in other jurisdictions but is not currently used in Alberta is to invest into Demand Side Management (DSM) through the utility system. DSM initiatives support consumers in all sectors and all financial abilities to reduce their energy bills and shift their energy use during times of high prices. This improves affordability for consumers while reducing emissions at the same time by supporting significant investments in energy efficiency, enabling demand response and reducing the cost of adding distributed energy resources to the system. 

DSM will become even more important as Alberta transitions to new technologies such as renewable energy and other low emission energy sources, and as the uptake of electric vehicles and heat pumps progresses. This is because DSM also helps to increase the flexibility of the utility system to better match increasingly dynamic supply and demand technologies while reducing costs at the same time. 

This project will engage key stakeholders in the DSM conversation to gather input on how Alberta should move forward to further explore DSM opportunities in the province and ultimately implement it within the utility system in a way that is complimentary to other emission reduction efforts in the province.

Alberta Energy Efficiency Alliance

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