Description
Stephanie Woodworth is mindful of the WYPW and the impact it has had on her life. As a member of the WYPW, she attended the 4th General Assembly in Brasilia, Brazil in March 2018 and connected with a group of 40 young water leaders from around the world. Stephanie describes her connection to this network as having found a long-lost family, finally brought together for the same purpose – for the water. After working together for a mere week in Brazil, Stephanie began to understand how water has no boundaries, no borders, no judgment. Water brings us together, across cultures, geographies, and histories: “water is life.”
One thing Stephanie says the WYPW members taught her (among many, many others), is that connection leads to protection. When you feel connected to something, you feel a responsibility to care for and protect it. From that week forward, she knew she needed to focus on youth education, specifically finding ways to connect youth to the land and water.
For her doctoral research, she is partnering with Dehcho First Nations (DFN) and Northern Water Futures (NWF) to assess DFN’s youth-focused on-the-land camps. DFN and NWF partnered in 2018 to bring graduate students doing research in the Dehcho to lead hands-on science activities at the camps, as well as share the burden of financial costs, which also opened the opportunity for a research project to evaluate the camps from the perspectives of the youth camp participants.
