One fine day in early May, Rhianna Nagel at UVic (who is in charge of community engaged learning opportunities) wrote to say she had an idea in mind for a project involving the house on Fernwood. Professor Cam Owens teaches Geography 406 - a course that explores the opportunities and challenges of planning ecologically, socially and environmentally just cities. Typically Cam and his students travel to a beacon of just urbanism (such as Copenhagen) for hands on learning, but because of Covid 19 the class was grounded. What’s more, the class would have to be taught online. Lucky us that the net zero renovation became a subject of study and under Cam’s inspired tutelage a group of his students developed beautiful projects over five weeks exhibited below. This was a thrilling collaboration! In the never more than  six degrees of separation department, I came to know of Rhianna through Elaina Mack - a mentor in a Neighborhood Champion training program I became involved in this year. I feel incredibly lucky to have been accepted into the first cohort of trainees (an excellent bunch of folks) and to have the tutelage of Gary Pemberton and Stacy Barter. Gary is Neighborhood Advisor for the City of Victoria and Stacy is director and co-founder of Shift Collaborative. For a newcomer to the city (I’m from Chicago and split my time between here and there) there could have been no finer introduction to the inner workings of Victoria - and to so many of the generous and brilliant people striving daily to make the capital of British Columbia such an incredibly welcoming, livable, righteous and activist city.

Stay tuned because in January 2021 the house will once again be a subject of study by U Vic students. Once agin we are grateful to Rhianna for thinking outside the box.