It’s hard to believe another year has gone by already! But when you think of everything we’ve been up to over the past year—from hosting the first Future Routes Festival to holding another LIT Conference and launching new workshops—it suddenly made sense that time has flown by so quickly. After all, time flies when you’re having fun!
We hosted our 17th Annual General Meeting (AGM) yesterday afternoon with a great turnout. One of BYTE’s founders, Nicole Edwards, stopped by and showed her ongoing support for BYTE’s work. Board members showed up to share their input and hear updates. We chatted with supporters and partners and barbecued lunch in the sun before sitting down to go over our past year. If you missed the meeting, here are some of the highlights from the past year:
- We hosted our first-ever Future Routes Festival in partnership with the Yukon College
- We reached 191 Whitehorse youth and 528 community youth in our workshops this year, meaning we had a total of 719 participants
- Our average satisfaction rating for workshops was 81%
- We went on 16 community tours and visited 9 different communities
- We put together a youth photography exhibit on climate change in Old Crow and Inuvik called This Is Our Arctic and displayed it in Inuvik, Whitehorse, and Vancouver
We’re also excited to announce some of our up-and-coming projects. Drumroll please….
BYTE will host another Future Routes festival in partnership with the Yukon College this September. The headliner will be announced in the coming months, so stay tuned!
This Is Our Arctic will grow and expand in the coming year. We’re planning another trip to Old Crow in the fall to engage youth to capture video footage of their elders so we can add a multimedia component to the exhibit. Our hope is that the exhibit will go on display in a big city in Ontario next!
We’ve got new and improved workshops in the works. Our Programming Researcher and intern from this past fall, Matt, is helping us put together a new Healthy Mindfulness workshop. We’ll also continue our “MOVE! Youth Helping Youth End Violence†workshop series this winter under a new name.
What’s more, we’re bringing our facilitation guide, BYTE University, online. Felicia, a recent graduate from the Yukon College’s multimedia program, is being contracted to help us with this project through the Arctic Institute of Community Based Research.
Our board of directors has changed for the upcoming year. Scott Carlson, Jessica Thiessen, and Joel Macht will be stepping down as board members. Their hard work has been invaluable to us!
In their stead, we’d like to welcome five new board members to the team. Ben Sanders spent the past two months delivering robot-making workshops to youth the Yukon’s communities, and is interested in our community outreach program. Andrea Zimmerman comes from a background in social work and education. Dwayne Latham is the RCMP youth liaison and Larisse McDonald is the Program Coordinator at the Victoria Faulkner Women’s Centre. They bring a diverse array of skills and expertise to our organization, and we’re excited to have such a strong board behind us for the coming year.
If you’d like find out more you can check out our newsletter. You can pick up a hard copy at the BYTE office or download a digital copy  here.
Thanks to everyone who came out for our AGM! Here’s to another fun year!
