The city of Edmonton is home to one of the largest and most diverse concentrations of skilled industrial tradespeople in Canada. The skills of these pipefitters, welders, ironworkers, crane operators, scaffolders, insulators, and many other building trades are transferable to renewable energy industries such as wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, biofuels and more.

Through the EcoCity Edmonton grant, Iron & Earth Edmonton will help create opportunities for, and support this constituency in their journey of establishing sustainable energy careers. This work will help the City of Edmonton become increasingly resilient as it works to reach ambitious climate and energy targets.

In pursuit of fulfilling this vision, Iron & Earth Edmonton will focus on these four pillars:
1. Building a community for workers and supporters
2. Developing sustainable energy careers
3. Building support for a prosperous transition to net-zero emissions by 2050
4. Building scalable sustainable energy demonstration projects

Iron & Earth Edmonton’s core tactics for fulfilling these pillars, are to host quarterly Shop Talk Night events, engage regularly with our worker membership, have a presence at Edmonton community events, and develop a Chapter Handbook to ensure sustainable chapter operations. Over the next year, Iron & Earth Edmonton will also identify an opportunity to develop an Edmonton based educational campaign or sustainable energy project of significance, which would be launched in 2020.

The usual format of the quarterly Shop Talk Nights will include one or more industry stakeholders sharing information about upcoming job opportunities and available career development resources. These events will also facilitate network building and relationship development.

Worker engagement will involve interviews with a minimum of 100 Iron & Earth worker members within 100km of the Edmonton area. The purpose of these interviews will be in part to more deeply understand worker needs and solutions moving forward.

The EcoCity Edmonton grant will support hiring an Edmonton Chapter Director with experience in the fossil fuel industry to lead the chapter from June 1, 2019 to May 30, 2020. This key leader will fill many roles and responsibilities and will require experience with hosting events, public speaking, and managing the operations/administration of an organization. Iron & Earth expects that this individual, with the support of Iron & Earth Headquarters team members, will be able to secure funding for the longer term.