Student climate striker still inspiring change
Shir Gruber helped lead the 2019 climate student strikes. Now she has parlayed that experience into a leadership role with Sustainable Youth Canada.
Wondering what happened to the leaders of the 2019 climate student strikes? Meet Shir Gruber. Now a Masters student at McGill University, Shir helped organize 500,000 people to take to the streets of Montreal (Tiohtiร :ke) and call for more action on climate justice. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and she really got busy.
Tell us what you have been doing since March 2020.
In 2019, I was in CEGEP and co-president of Dawson Collegeโs environmental club. Stakeholder engagement combined with community-led scientific research led to the installation of composting facilities for all 10,000 students.
I joined Sustainable Youth Canada/รcosystรจme Jeunesse Canada (SYC). We learned about a green space near Montreal, Angell Woods, with wetlands and old-growth forest that had been a dumping ground, but the local youth were trying to clean it up. SYCโs โProject Phoenixโ added capacity to their efforts. Youth community members identified a particularly polluted area of the park. Together, we assessed the extent of the problem, engaged the broader community, cleaned, sorted and catalogued the origins of the trash, ran scientific tests on the soil, analyzed the growth of invasive species through satellite imagery and reported findings to the municipal government.