Cortes Island’s own Jemma Hicken just released her first major album, ‘Get it Together.’ Cortes Currents interviewed her shortly before that.
“I love performing and I love playing music by myself too, but it does feel special to come back to Cortes and be able to perform on Cortes because it’s really where it started for me,” she said.
Continue reading Jemma Hicken releases her first major album: ‘Get It Together’
The Cortes Island Academy appears to have its full quota of 20 students for 2023/24.
Manda Aufochs Gillespie, the Academy’s principle Board member, explained, “We’ve let the first 20 students know that they have a spot if they want it, and then we’ll start taking students off our wait list. This time last year, we were still like, ‘Oh no, we don’t know if anybody will sign up for this crazy new program we have.’ This year, not only is it an established program that’s going to keep continuing into the future, but we had so many applicants that we had to have a wait list.”
Continue reading Cortes Island Academy has students for next semester; needs funding
“It’s such a different experience from normal school. I think really just connecting with people, and having a class where you can be friends with everyone in it.”
“It regains my faith in humanity a little bit, seeing everyone be so supportive.”
“A lesson that I’ll be taking with me, is that I can learn from everybody who I meet.”
Those were some of the student comments from the Cortes Island Academy website. The 2022/2023 semester is now over and the academy is preparing for a Forest Ecology Semester in 2023/2024.
Continue reading Cortes Island Academy: Looking back to lessons learned and forward to 2023/2024
Dr Suzanne Simard was the feature speaker at the Forest Trust for the Children of Cortes Island Society AGM on Saturday. During the course of her brief talk, Dr Simard discussed some of the innovations she values on Cortes Island and also the Mother Tree Network’s plans here. This is an abridged transcript of her talk, starting with the introduction by Forrest Berman Hatch
Forrest Berman-Hatch: It’s my honor to introduce Dr. Suzanne Simard, who I’m sure many of you are familiar with. Simard has been courageous in her outspoken, defence of old growth forests. She was on the front lines at Fairy Creek and she’s inspired many in our generation. For generations, environmentalists have been trying to speak on behalf of the wild places, and now Dr. Simard is showing the world that these places speak for themselves and perhaps quite literally.
Continue reading Dr Suzanne Simard: The Mother Tree Network & Cortes Island
“The Cortes Island Academy is working on becoming its own nonprofit, but right now it actually functions as a program of the Cortes Island Community Foundation. Part of this was because I have had this interest in trying to figure out if we could create a high school pilot program and I work part-time as the Executive Director of the Cortes Island Community Foundation. So there was an obvious link, but it really goes back to the root of why we need a high school program on Cortes,” explained Manda Aufochs Gillespie.
Continue reading Why the Cortes Island Academy is a program of the Cortes Foundation
