There was little discussion. The Strathcona Regional District Board approved the agreements at their August 19th meeting. Cortes Island’s two community halls and first responders are one step closer to receiving funding.
Continue reading One step closer: Community Halls and First RespondersTag Archives: Radio
Listening In To Authors From The Vancouver Writer’s Festival
A series of readings from writers whose works will be featured at the Vancouver Writers Festival, October 19-25, 2020.
Aug 24: The Cat’s Table
The Cat’s Table is a novel by Canadian author Michael Ondaatje first published in 2011. It was a shortlisted nominee for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The novel is a coming of age story about an 11-year-old boy’s journey on a large ship’s three-week voyage from Columbo to England, via the Suez Canal and Mediterranean.
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Reinventing Hollyhock for a virtual world
In a normal year, Cortes Island’s best known learning centre needs to take in $3 million in revenues to keep operating. 2020 has been anything but normal. As a result of COVID, most of this year’s programs were cancelled and Hollyhock could not rehire most of its usual staff. This has also been a year of innovations: with courses being offered online for the first time and a day-long virtual Hollyhock-a-thon called ‘Shine the Light.’ The Cortes Island centre’s response to this year’s challenges almost amounts to reinventing Hollyhock for a virtual world.
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Cortes Island Women’s Centre
The Covid-19 lockdown has sparked an upsurge in domestic violence both in Canada and worldwide, as well as making it harder for support services to offer counseling and shelter for victims.
On April 15, 2020, I interviewed Tanya Henck, founding member of the first Cortes Island Women’s Centre which opened in January 2019. A combination of diligent sanitization and long microphone cables, plus a newly constructed and never-inhabited space, enabled us to set up for Covid-19-safe recording. (The room was so bare that you may hear a certain amount of natural reverb in the podcast.)
Tanya has lived on Cortes Island for 14 years, and has long been aware of the persistent and under-addressed problem of domestic violence. Every community whether rural or urban has to deal with this issue, she says, and Cortes is no exception. Yet Cortes, she feels, has been for years “behind the times” in coming to grips with this problem.
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An IndigenEYEZ Training Series: Touch The Earth
A local youth attended an IndigenEYEZ training series: the goals are 5 fold: to strengthen the way that we walk in the world through the five modules – connecting to myself, to others, to community, to our cultural strengths, and to the land.
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