The Executive Director of the Lake Huron Centre for Coastal Conservation says this year's pandemic presented some unique challenges.
But Erinn Lawrie says it also gave them the opportunity to adapt and try out new things and get comfortable with technology.
She says successes for 2020 included their brand new Coastal Conservation Youth Corps program.
“We were able to launch our brand new Coastal Conservation Youth Corps program. We had to adapt and change it to make sure that it was safe to hold during the pandemic, but we were able to have 29 local teens participate in this program,” said Lawrie.
Participants got a chance to learn about the coastal environment, develop leadership and job skills and work on a range of projects that helped to benefit coastal communities.
Lawrie says they also had to make some adjustments for their Is the Coast Clear Conference, but they did and it was a huge success.
“We had to shift it entirely online, but that still went really well and overall this year we were able to have over 1,300 people participate in free educational programming to learn about the ecology of Lake Huron, bio-diversity, all of the coastal processes that were going on,” added Lawrie.
The conference is a major fundraiser for The Centre and that allowed them to continue to run several programs through the year.
“We were so fortunate to have such wonderful donors and supporters who helped us to keep going through this pandemic and have the successful year that we had. It would not have been possible without our donors, so we're very grateful,” said Lawrie.
She adds, anyone interested in donating to the Lake Huron Centre can do that by going to their web site at lakehuron.ca.
