Quadra ICAN recently hired Ramona Boyle as the Coordinator to oversee their operations. This was advertised as a part time position, which is expected to take approximately 40 hours a month. Cortes Currents asked the Heriot Bay resident about her new role.

“After I was interviewed for the job, I was told that the reason that I got it is because of my intense practicality.  I’m a problem solver and I get things done,” she explained. “When I first started working with ICAN about two years ago, some of the people came to my property here and they looked around at what I had built. I have goats, chickens, ducks, rabbits, a huge garden and water collection system. All kinds of systems that didn’t exist before. The property was in quite rundown condition when we bought it. I don’t have a lot of money and I don’t have certain skills, but if I needed it, I learned it. So we had to build a barn. I learned how to build a barn and put a roof on it, learned how to do a water collection system and learned how to repair a flooded roof. I’m pretty practical.”

 Cortes Currents: What will you do as ICAN’s Coordinator?

Ramona Boyle: “I think ICAN is a really important enterprise in the community because it brings together over a hundred registered members who each participate in what they’re passionate about.”

“I came to ICAN through the food security team that works to create access to nutritious local food, to reduce reliance on food that has to be brought in by truck to the island. There is a team that is focused on water security, another one that’s focused on transportation and another that’s focused on energy. Each of these committees has its own focus and energy that comes to it, which I find very energizing. It’s not a top down organization that tells us, do this, do this, do this. It’s very much people in the community who say, ‘this is what would make the community stronger, better, more resilient in the face of climate change or economic change.’”

“I think that my job as coordinator is to keep that energy burning and to focus it into projects that come to fruition. It’s that connection between having an idea, having a passion for something, and then getting it done so that it’s a working solution.” 

“It’s early days to see how it’s going to work in practice, but part of it is sitting in on each of these action committees as an observer to identify where there are bottlenecks to a project moving forward and then clearing that for them. Whatever is needed, if it’s a, a permit, then it’s my job to ensure that the necessary permits are in place or to apply for funding if that’s what’s needed, or to gather together a pool of volunteers for a particular project.”  

“First is just to watch and see what you need cleared out of the way, so that you can make your vision real. That’s my job. I view myself as the locomotive of the train that says, ‘get out of the way so that the train can go through.’” 

“Sometimes those barriers are not external. Sometimes it’s a matter of tweaking a vision. For example, when the Library of Things was first imagined a couple of years ago, we began to see information about it, got very excited, but then it didn’t happen. That was frustrating for a lot of community members who are like, ‘darn it! I need a lawnmower now.’”

“What we discovered when we  stepped back and looked at it was that the Library of Things was working in one direction and at the same time, the food recovery team was developing a lending cupboard of food preservation materials. It didn’t make sense to have two separate lending locations. I don’t think people differentiate in their mind between, I need a lawnmower and I need a pressure canner: they’re tools. So putting those two things together and ensuring that those two groups coordinated on it was one way of  moving it forward to actually happening so that you’re not duplicating, for example, computer systems for monitoring.”

“That’s something that I can see because I can step back a little bit and see how we have finite  human resources. We don’t want to double up on work. We want to make sure that things are intuitively logical too for users.” 

Cortes Currents: Tell us a little bit about yourself and your connection to Quadra Island. 

“My dad was military, so I moved probably every two years.  As an adult, I spent most of my career in China and South Korea. I was a high school teacher and a university lecturer.”

“Then one of my daughters became quite ill and we had to return to Canada.” 

“I didn’t really have any hope of getting a job teaching in BC where my family is.  My brother is in Campbell River, my mom and dad are in Comox and my older brother is on the Mainland, but teaching  was not a possibility here at the time. I think they had  a wait list of 400 teachers in the school district, so that wasn’t going to happen. So I ended up working at a private school in Calgary for the last nine years of my career.” 

“During that time I continued to look for a property to retire to, but I was a single mom and didn’t have a pension. I didn’t work with unions for all of my career, so I didn’t have  anything to retire with. Then we found this property on Quadra that we could afford and it was not at all what I was looking for. I was looking for something very small, very modest and we ended up buying a property that has four apartments in it. The apartments are rented now. I’m very happy to be able to provide some housing for the desperate market that there is on Quadra, but it meant that the building paid for itself while I was still teaching in Calgary.”

“I would come out to develop the infrastructure, fence it, build the gardens, create the water collection systems and replace the roof and the stairs and all of that sort of stuff.” 

“There was a serendipitous coincidence when, a year after we bought the property, there was  a note from somebody on Cortes that was looking for a place to rent during the school year. Her daughter was going to high school in Campbell River and it was too far to commute. So Mary Claire Preston and Bill Wheeler ended up staying  at my place for three years with their daughter Katie.”  

“Bill did a lot of the work around the property. He fenced the property for us and built us a beautiful wooden gate. If anybody comes from Cortes,  they will notice these gorgeous gates that were constructed to fence off the property. He built the woodshed.” 

“Mary Claire was the post mistress at the Heriot Bay Store, which is just across the road from me. And when they would go home for school holidays to Cortes, I was able to come back to my home here on Quadra and continue working. It just worked out so great for us.”

“They were here for a couple of years, then she was able to get her job in Whaletown so that she wasn’t commuting any longer. So for the last year, Katie was living here by herself  and Bill would come over once a week and on the weekends to be with her.”

“After we had owned the property for three years,  COVID struck. Katie went back to Cortes and finished her high school there. I was able to start teaching from home. So I moved back to Quadra and I spent six months here, then went back to Calgary to do the last year of my teaching and decided I couldn’t be away  from Quadra any longer and retired early. So I’ve been full-time now, on Quadra, for a year and a half.” 

Links:

• Quadra ICAN website
• Quadra ICAN Facebook page
• articles about, or mentioning, Quadra ICAN on Cortes Currents

Top image credit: Assorted tools Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash

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