Student Scholarships

We are pleased to award this year’s Student Scholarship to Charissa Steel. Charissa is a Landscape Design and Installation student at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Her leadership and dedication both on and off campus make her a worthy recipient of this honour.

Charissa is Vice-President of Kwantlen’s Landscape Club, which provides additional lecture topics and social events for members of her program. She also serves as a lab assistant and peer tutor. And Charissa is on the President’s Honour Role for academic standing.

In terms of her class work, Charissa has done exceptionally well with a recent assignment to design a landscape for the “Gathering Place” Aboriginal Centre on Kwantlen’s Surrey campus. Her design incorporated traditional elements such as wooden arches representing welcome posts, native plants used by the Kwantlen for food and medicine, and natural features like stumps for displaying art in the future. Charissa’s design was selected as one of three finalists presented to the stakeholder group overseeing the landscaping project.

Charissa also applies her learning in her efforts off-campus. In October, she participated in a Home Team project to makeover a Port Coquitlam family’s front and back yards. The goal was to create a beautiful landscape that would be accessible to the family’s son, who is in a wheelchair. During the project, Charissa volunteered to be the student foreman of the work focusing on the backyard. Organizers say she was critical to the project being completed on-time and a success.

Having a solid grounding in practical experience as well as classwork is a good combination for a student entering parks and recreation. University of Victoria Recreation and Health Education Program student Suzanne Vander Wekken is certainly off to a good start.

Academically, she’s at the top of her class. Suzanne’s assignment work shows her level of concern for issues facing communities today. In one project, she created a social marketing plan for Esquimalt to increase active transportation among citizens.

Suzanne has then taken what she’s learned in class and applied it in a practical setting, forming close ties with BCRPA and its initiatives along the way. She started as a Community Research Assistant for Esquimalt’s Active Communities Initiative. There she created a sustainable community action plan to increase active transportation. Her work prompted the Township to install bike racks in its parks. She also worked on projects in connection with Earth Day, developing educational material on nutrition and planning unique walking routes. In 2008, Suzanne was a volunteer at Symposium in Victoria. She’s been a youth worker in Esquimalt’s teen centre. And she currently works as the Evaluation Coordinator for BCRPA’s provincial Healthy Food and Beverage Sales Initiative.

If that weren’t enough, when she’s off the job she encourages others to share her passion for recreation. Suzanne organizes a regular event aimed at creating positive opportunities for people in their 20’s and 30’s to engage in healthy physical activity and expand their social networks. She also has created a program to introduce students to hiking opportunities around the Capital Region.

It is a privilege for BCRPA to present Suzanne Vander Wekken with a 2009 Student Scholarship.