
Read the Latest
Read the Latest
AFTER A LONG WINTER AND NOW THE PANDEMIC W2R IS STARTING TO GET ORGANIZED FOR OUR NEXT INSTALS.Yes I am happy to say that today I was able to get over to Nanaimo to look at our storage facility ULOCK STORAGE to organize our shelving for our upcoming 5 instals. This has been a long time coming. Our communities have now given us the green light to come into their nation so stay tuned for some amazing instals that will be happening.The visit today is also to speak with our friends at the Nanaimo Correctional Centre to plan our future furniture builds. It is truly amazing what they have done for W2R.Just for a chuckle here I am with my COVID19 haircut (none since Jan 2020) and will not be cut until the pandemic is over lol.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!W2R Lockers at NANAIMO ULOCK ARE FULL and we have been given the green light from our waiting communities which means we now can get moving. First off the line will be Aboriginal Mothers Care Centre in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, followed by GITSEGUKLA located on Highway 16 near New Hazleton BC, Littlest People Elementary School Capilano reserve, and completion of Little Chiefs Elementary School library – Williams Lake FN and the Learning Centre at TSIDELDEL FN Chilcotin. It is going to be a busy few months….. stay tuned.
A shining example how a W2R community has used their library. Congratulations to Jess Housty and the BELLA BELLA community…
Need to brighten up your cloudy day? Stop by our library/office and check out this beautiful new mural by Thomas Kero! Photos don’t do it justice. There are so many hidden creatures and special features nestled into the summertime foliage. Find more of Tom’s work here: www.thomaskero.com
GITSEGUKLA LEARNING CENTRE INSTAL IS NOW FULL STEAM AHEAD….After another long drive from Prince George we arrived in the community about 2.45pm on Tuesday. As usual the LRT’s swung into action with the School staff and Principal Louise Ormerod. Once unloaded the LRT’s started to organize the layout of the learning centre.
GITSEGUKLA – DAY 1 INSTAL – The team started off early and have been progressing really well. We have already had to go to Terrace – a 3 hr return trip – to get some more shelving tabs plus a HDMI cable for the TV. Chris GILLEN CEO Total Support Services helped us out and did the 3 hour trek!
MEET CHRIS GILLEN CEO TOTAL SUPPORT SOLUTIONSWe in W2R have been blessed with great sponsors. Our latest sponsor TOTAL SUPPORT SOLUTIONS came about as a result of a Victoria-Harbourside Rotary Club meeting just a few weeks ago. Bob Blacker was giving a W2R presentation and during that zoom talk connected with one of the members. This member said her son-in-law was working with FN in relation to computers and IT training & solutions. A few days later Bob received a call from Chris GILLEN TOTAL SUPPORT CEO in relation to what W2R was doing and as a result we now has a supplier of computers and all hardware associated with the learning centre installations. In addition TOTAL SUPPORT will at no cost support the computers and look after any problems that may surface with the ability to fix those problems online. This has been huge for us as the support for our computers has always been a concern, now we do not have to worry about that.More impressive to us, CEO Chris joined us on our trip to GITSEGUKLA so he is seeing firsthand how we conduct our instals as well as how we connect with our community…. win win all around!
SUPPER & MEETING WITH GITSEGUKLA CHIEF AND COUNCIL.With an amazing setting PRINCESS LAKE our W2R team were able to meet up with Chief Willie and 3 of his council members. This was a great evening that allowed members of the team to chat with key members of the community. The evening ended with a handshake between Chief Willie and Leader of the W2R team Bob Blacker cementing the agreement and the blossoming friendship and trust with GITSEGUKLA. The evening was topped off with a W2R IMAGINEERING SESSION with Scott where those in attendance were in awe of what Scott designed for the community. Our W2R team have never experienced this especially with a Chief and his council members. What our team gained from this exposure was priceless and made their trip a memorable one. As one of the LRT’s said this what makes it all worth it.
SUPPER & MEETING WITH GITSEGUKLA CHIEF AND COUNCIL.With an amazing setting PRINCESS LAKE our W2R team were able to meet up with Chief Willie and 3 of his council members. This was a great evening that allowed members of the team to chat with key members of the community. The evening ended with a handshake between Chief Willie and Leader of the W2R team Bob Blacker cementing the agreement and the blossoming friendship and trust with GITSEGUKLA. The evening was topped off with a W2R IMAGINEERING SESSION with Scott where those in attendance were in awe of what Scott designed for the community. Our W2R team have never experienced this especially with a Chief and his council members. What our team gained from this exposure was priceless and made their trip a memorable one. As one of the LRT’s said this what makes it all worth it.
ITS A WRAP – THE GITSEGUKLA W2R V3.0 LEARNING CENTRE IS COMPLETE.After 3 days of hard work the W2R along with Principal Louise Ormerod and her staff have completed W2R’s very first V3.0 learning centre. We had some hiccups but we were able to prevail, the new library/resource centre looks great!
The next delivery of a library is now in the planning stages. Project Coordinator Bob Blacker reports that the “hobbit house,” the “office on wheels” kindly donated by recently Western Camera Buildings, will be taken up to the far northern community of Metlakatla soon. Located just north of Prince Rupert, it’s a long way to drive to deliver anything, but the small library, equipped with computers and shelving and books, will make an impact in that community as all library deliveries have accomplished to date.
In a new development, Bob will be bringing a camera and video recorder with him and will be shooting video footage of the entire trip. The footage will come in useful as W2R plans to produce a documentary about our aboriginal library project soon. To date the problem has been a lack of video content. It’s not easy to transport libraries to remote destinations, and it’s not easy to shoot video footage while juggling many others tasks, but Bob is going to give it a go. Let’s stay tuned and see what happens.
Friday, October 22, 2021 — 11:00 am Pacific Time
Literacy, Learning and Life in Indigenous Communities Through Libraries and Learning Centres
Dubbed the ‘original champion spark plug’ by His Honour, Steven L. Point, the 28th Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, Shirley-Pat Chamberlain (nèe Gale) is a passionate literacy advocate and is honoured to act as co-lead with Bob Blacker for Write to Read BC. Shirley-Pat is a woman of mixed heritage and is Tl’esqox na whelh deni heelen (adoptee of Tl’esqox). She brings over 20 years of leadership, community planning and development, fund development, grant writing, project management, facilitation, teaching, and mentorship. Shirley-Pat is a proud member of the Rotary Club of Steveston and received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Award in 2012 for outstanding volunteerism.
Shirley-Pat has built strong and meaningful relationships with each Indigenous community or Nation that she has had the privilege and honour of working across the Pacific Northwest as well as non-Indigenous organizations, communities, and governments. She is currently a PhD Candidate at the University of Edinburgh.
Bob is a retired New Westminster Police Inspector. He joined Rotary in 1996 and has served as Club President. In 2008 – 2009, Bob became District Governor for Rotary District 5040, made up 54 Clubs across British Columbia. In 1998, Bob became an Honorary Aide de Camp (HADC) to the Lt. Governor of British Columbia. In 2007 His Honour, Steven Point, and Bob started to work together to get books into isolated First Nations Communities in British Columbia. In 2012, after his term as Lt. Governor, H.H. Steven Point returned to the Bench as a Provincial Court Judge. As a result, Bob carried on as the Project Leader. Both men never dreamt that WRITE TO READ would be as successful as it is today.
W2R ROCKY PINES LEARNING CENTRE INSTALLED
What began as a trip on the high seas to the Nanaimo Correctional Centre and our U LOCK Storage locker, waiting for ferries, a 3 hour drive up the Coquihalla Highway to Merritt and a short drive to ROCKY PINES our LRT’s Margaret, Carol, Liz and Marion (sorry to miss Barb this trip) working very hard – our 17th learning centre was installed.
I have great admiration for our team as the air conditioning was not working in the learning centre (the professionals tried everything to get it going) and as such the ladies had to work through 90 degree heat. I am glad we shut down early due to the heat however Chris Bur and myself went back later that evening to instal the TV and computers it went up to 99….. quickly opening the doors and window we were able to get it down to a respectable 90.
Now we just have to wait for the amazing donation of new aboriginal books from GOODMINDS. The largest donation yet, 1,000 books..(pre school to adult) an $18,000 gift. Thank you Jeff Burnham for this wonderful gift to the community.
W2R LEARNING CENTRE – ROCKY PINES – WELL UNDER WAY FOR COMPLETION
Just a week ago Margaret Fletcher (Leader of the W2R Library Response Team) and I travelled up to Merritt and the Lower Nicola Band and met up with our W2R AMBASSADOR, Sue Sterling-Bur and LOWER NICOLA BAND Councillor Leona Marie Antoine to look at their new Community Centre located in the ROCKY PINES community where they have a room set aside for a W2R LEARNING CENTRE…. The trip was excellent, NO SNOW!, the room and building is outstanding and we will make it into a great learning centre for the community…..
NEPETS 2018 Update#3:
So honoured and humbled by this opportunity to share My Rotary Story and the Write to Read Project. The NEPETS family did it again – not only did the incoming President-Elect class of 2018-2019 again give me money from their own pockets BUT the 2017-2018 District Governors represented will also be making donations! The approximate $2500 gift from these amazing Rotary Leaders plus the DGs donations will be leveraged into the W2R-BC’s first Rotary Foundation GLOBAL GRANT!! Hopefully the first of many
?This will enable us to build the first community designed culturally responsive community gathering space to build literacy equity WITH Xeni Gwet’in.
My heart is full – Sechanalyagh
WRITE TO READ MOVING IN DIRECTIONS WE NEVER DREAMED OF 10 YEARS AGO.
W2R has made many improvements to our libraries and learning centres along the way and now designing & building those very centres. Our very first one was just a library in a module donated by then BRITCO BUILDING INNOVATIONS (they gave us 14). The community was TOOSEY (Tkl’esqox) which is in the Chilcotin area of BC near Williams Lake.
TOOSEY was our 1st library thanks to the very hard work of Original Champion Spark Plug and now W2R Ambassador Shirley-Pat Chamberlain. It was very fitting that our next direction with W2R would be pioneered by TOOSEY.
Our next direction is to DESIGN and BUILD homes for community members. These homes would be 1 -2-3 bedrooms and would be designed by the community with the assistance of our W2R ARCHITECT (and magician) SCOTT KEMP. We did just that this week with SHIRLEY-PAT, SCOTT KEMP and myself going to TOOSEY sitting down with the community and coming up with some very interesting designs.
We did not stop there, we are going to train community members with the trades that will allow them to build there own homes. TOOSEY is way ahead in this direction and we feel it can be done………. but one of the best things of this trip was to see an enterprise which is owned by the TOOSEY FN – Chilcotin Plateau Enterprises, who remodelled a school which they use to train FN personal in carpentry trades and more importantly milling skills using a PORTABLE MILL. As a result of our visit we are going to explore how we can partner with CHILCOTIN PLATEAU and run courses for all of our communities who will be using portable mills to cut lumber for their builds…… FIRST NATION training FIRST NATION for FIRST NATIONS……
Literacy and Learning Centres remain to be the cornerstone of W2R but we are also a community building project, as we say there is a lot more to do, WATER, HEALTH just a couple of things we will address with ROTARY one community at a time……
This is community capacity building at its best……
W2R DESIGN TEAM VISITS THE SXOXOMIC COMMUNITY SCHOOL at ESK’ETEMC and ENDS UP DESIGNING A LIBRARY WITH THE KIDS…
Through our W2R AMBASSADOR Shirley-Pat Chamberlain we were able to connect with the Principal of this recently opened elementary school. The problem is that they have a really nice & newly built school which does not have a library.
Bring in the design team of W2R ARCHITECT SCOTT KEMP, W2R TEAM LEADER BOB BLACKER and AMBASSADOR Shirley-Pat Chamberlain – mix it with Grade 7 Students magical things can happen…. We had an amazing lunch and session with the kids in the end we had designed where the shelving (made by our team at Nanaimo Correctional Centre) would be placed. So all that is to remain is for our W2R Library Response Team leader Margaret Fletcher to visit the school to review what books they would like and our ABORIGINAL BOOK distributor GOODMINDS BOOK and Jeff Burnham to be contacted by the school for purchase of aboriginal authored books – we will have a cool library….. This was our first session that we have had with students from an elementary school….. and it was a blast!