Welcome to our School Grounds Transformation Website!
Over the last six years, the Canadian Biodiversity Institute has been active in transforming school grounds from barren "prison-like" environments into nurturing, health, biodiverse spaces where children and the community can connect with their own natural spirits. By creating these oases of greenery in schools across the country, we can all help bring biodiversity back into our communities and give our children the precious opportunity to be in touch with the natural world. While simultaneously improving their quality of life, we can also better protect them from health hazards such as over-exposure to UV radiation, and air and noise pollution.
Drawing from our experience, CBI has created this website to directly provide you with valuable information, useful advice and a wide range of ideas for transforming your own school grounds. Our goal is to give you the necessary tools for planning, developing and using your school grounds so that you can confidently move forward to create a sustainable transformation project that will benefit both your school and the broader community over the long term.
Ann Coffey, who coordinates CBI's School Grounds Transformation Programme, has a well-deserved reputation in Canada as a leader in school grounds transformation. She has developed a tried and tested planning process that helps to ensure the long-term success of these projects. This website, as well as the upcoming CBI Guide to Transforming Your School Grounds to be published in 2002, will make her expertise available to everyone who wants to undertake this challenging but immensely rewarding work.
Ann has developed the content of the webpages and provided the artwork, diagrams, plans and many of the photographs. She has worked closely with Webmaster Reid Ivens of N-VisionIT Interactive and project manager Eric Snyder of TCM.com, Inc. to design the site. Health Canada has been the major sponsor for the development of the website and Magma Communications has provided assistance with logistics. We are grateful to both these sponsors for their generous support.
CBI would like to invite you to help us increase the usefulness of this website to schools and communities across Canada by sending us photographs and details about your project. We have created the Sharing webpage for posting the information you send to encourage schools that are in various stages of transforming their grounds to network with each other, to show the diversity of innovative ideas and to encourage schools that have not yet started to dream of redesigning their grounds to think about the possibilities for change.
We hope you enjoy our Website and look forward to interacting with you on a regular basis.
