Sometimes the planet sends a small thank you note back. This time it arrived for all of us at once. A few weeks ago I wrote a story about the 29th annual Trash Bash at TRU. It was a quiet, ordinary morning that turned into a curriculum: bending down again and again near the Science…

This year I had the privilege of serving as Agency Field Instructor for two BSW practicum students whose self-directed research practicum redefined what community-based learning can look like: Brittney Fletcher and Tamarau Bingila.In a self-directed research practicum, students don’t slot into a single agency. They build their own path, mapping community resources, conducting informational interviews…

I spent this spring studying our city’s strengths. Here is what I found, and why it gave me hope. Kamloops takes its name from the Secwépemctsín word for “where the rivers meet,” the confluence of the North and South Thompson at the heart of Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc territory. That meeting place is both the city’s…

One year ago, Kamloops gathered in a university classroom to bear witness. We watched Standing Free together, asked Maxim Khomenko our questions, and turned a documentary screening into direct support for Ukraine. That evening, the distance between Kamloops and the frontlines disappeared for two hours. On Friday, June 12, 2026, it disappears again. And this…

Somewhere in Kamloops right now, a student is finishing an assignment between hospital visits. A neighbour is cooking a second dinner to drop off down the street. A son is helping his mother with her medications before heading to his evening shift. A parent is studying for an exam with a toddler asleep on their…

When a firefighter answers an alarm in British Columbia, a paramedic takes a call in Kentucky, or a rescue crew launches into the Black Sea from a Ukrainian port, something deeper than training carries them through. Behind every uniform is a set of values that sustains people through the hardest moments of their work and…

Дві Університети, Один Якір Notes from the first week of Educating for Social Change · Kamloops and Lviv, May 2026 This week I begin teaching Educating for Social Change in two classrooms at once. One classroom is at Thompson Rivers University, where I have the honour of meeting students I have taught before, students whom…

The morning began the way most Thursdays in Westsyde begin this month, with the small, ordinary rituals of taking care of where we live. I rolled the recycling bins to the curb (it is recycling day pick up in the area). There is something quietly hopeful about putting your recycling out on the right day.…

Every Saturday since February 24, 2022, we have gathered. Through snow and heat, through grief and stubborn hope, we stand with Ukraine. But on the second Saturday of May, something tender joins us. The rushnyky come out, strung between us like a quiet alphabet of love. Each one was stitched by hands we knew or…

Eighty-one years ago today, Nazi Germany was defeated. Millions died to make that defeat possible. Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, Kazakhs, Jews, Poles, Roma, Indigenous soldiers from across the Soviet Union, Allied forces from around the world. Their memory belongs to all of humanity, and it deserves better than what the Kremlin has done with it. Today…

April 25, 2026, 52 years after the Carnation Revolution There is a vase of carnations on our table this week. Pink, peach, soft yellow, deep purple, the white ones streaked with magenta as if someone painted them by hand. I bought them at Costco. They are not heroic flowers. They are not from a Lisbon…

An Invitation to Continue A Call to Shevchenko Voices Around the World What Eleven Days Taught Me Eleven cities. Eleven monuments. Eleven encounters with the same bronze face in eleven different languages, on eleven different pedestals, in eleven different versions of what it means to carry Ukraine into the world. Kranj. Vienna. Washington. Bratislava. Zagreb.…