Hi everyone welcome back to my blog, for those who are new we are raising awareness and helping out with a provincial park located on salt spring island, called ruckle parc.
1. Where are we with our action?
Recently as a group our main focus has been on the Instagram, with creating engaging and accurate content. In order to check that our information is entirely accurate we have been coordinating with multiple historians and experts from the island. We have had multiple more people direct inquire and engage with us about the park, which has been great as this was one of our primary goals. Individually I just attended ruckle park day where I helped to give tours and orientations of the oldest house on the farm, I was there for over six hours and probably helped over 200 people making it a very fulfilling day. The presentations and tours I gave were all worked on as a group prier to the event, with some help form Brenda and other members of the society to make sure they were accurate and respectful.
this is a guy who was their selling really good popsicles, I thought I would add him in as I probably had like six!
2. Successes We’ve Had So Far
For me the biggest success so far has been the amount of different people I got to give tours to at ruckle park day. This was a particularly big win for me as it allowed me to talk to such a variety of people. Some of the people I was giving tours to had never even been to the parc before, and some of them had practically grown up going their and even knew the family. One of the people that really stood out to me was a guy maybe in his thirties with two little kids who told me about how he had been going to the park since he was little and now brings his kids, he then told me that he had never known about the history and knowing really gave him an even deeper appreciation of the park. That encounter was a big success for me as it pretty much encapsulated our whole goal in a single interaction.
3. Challenges Faced (and How We’ve Overcome Them)
One of the biggest challenges has been trying to find media that we can share without stealing someone else’s work, this has been quite hard as most good photographers work is copyrighted and none of us live on island to take photos leaving us with poor quality stock photos. As a solution we have been reaching out to the societies we work with to see he photos that they have that we can use for our work. This has been a major help with trying to design adequate media. The one problem that we are still struggling with is trying to get the youth involved, on the island the youth make up a small fraction of the general population, making it quite hard to get youth involved in the park. Having youth involvement is crucial in the success of our mission as they will make up the next generation of park enthusiasts and advocators. Out plan to get the younger population involved is by making easier to digest, quick and fun media. We also may try to reach out to some of the schools to advertise youth involvement in the parks.
4. What’s Next?
Hopefully we can continue to grow are sites by posting more stories, we hope to soon post a livestream tour with info on the park, with a little help from one of the members of the society. We also as previously mentioned hope to get in touch with some of the local schools to spark youth interest and maybe also talk to them about the value of preserving important places like ruckle park.
Thank you for reading,
– Savannah
