Elephant Thoughts, Canada’s largest charitable organization supporting Educational Outreach in First Nations communities, has been operating out of Sipeknekatik for the past year.

The program provides opportunities for students in the area to develop a passion for science through interactive events.

The goal behind the programming is to make it fun, make it hands-on, celebrate and embrace the local culture, and involve the whole community. This goal is evident through all of the different events offered in the community.

Dianna Trull, educator and Elephant Thoughts program director at Sipeknekatik, is very excited about how the program is going. “We can get between 60 – 90 parents and kids for each of our weekly community events, depending on the weather. We also offer after school programming for the children in the community, which is also quite well attended.”

The community is able to hire staff from the community and it helps to employ a lot of teen mentors who will eventually move up into supervisory positions. The goal of the program is that in a few years the community will take over the staffing of the entire program and it will be run internally.

“This is the easiest program to work with,” said mentor Haley Ward. “The activities are planned out and we just follow the plan. The kids love everything we do and whenever they see us outside of here they ask us about what is happening next.”

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