Meet the UnTours Giveaway Runner-up: Kathryn Cooper, sustainability enthusiast, practitioner and educator.
We had two fantastic UnTours Giveaway nominees this year. And although Father Tom won the vote, it was a very tough choice for us here at UnTours!
Our runner-up, Kathryn Cooper, is the founder and Chief Learning Officer of the Sustainability Learning Centre (SLC), an organization dedicated to spreading green practices and knowledge.
Cooper grew up in Canada and started her career training and developing in the food technology industry at the University of Guelph. Education and environmental sustainability proved to be her passion, so she quit her paying job to go back to school for a Master’s of Education with a concurrent diploma in Education for Sustainability and Environment.
After completing her degree, she used retirement funds to start her own company, the Sustainability Learning Centre, which she has run for about 8 years. Through the center she provides training to businesses to introduce and improve green business practices such as measuring greenhouse gases, buying sustainable products and turning employees on to sustainable actions.
As a volunteer, she engages her community in green initiatives, such a school projects to install refillable water bottle fountains in public places, and provides free home visits to residents who want to reduce their environmental footprint, use sustainable transportation and eat more local food.
Cooper has helped companies such as Dupont, WWF Canada, Zerofootprint, Wrigley and Trillium Insurance.
She is also helping the University of Toronto develop a Corporate Social Responsibility Certificate.
Cooper is known to many as an extremely hard worker with a positive can-do attitude and goes out of her way to see every project through to completion. About a year ago, a 6th grade class was assigned to write a paper about people in their community who are passionate about water. Naturally, they chose Kathryn. They asked her to be a guest speaker and not only did she present to their class, but she sent a unique, individual letter back to each and every student within the week.
As a teacher and friend at the Upper Grand School District told us, “Kathryn is an amazing person. She wants to give the kids ownership and appropriate role models. The kids then want to make a difference.”
Being the president of her own company, a mother of two teenage boys, and serving on the School Board of Trustees that oversees 71 schools, she is an extremely busy woman with little time and scant resources for a vacation.
Cooper says she would like to get to Europe to see how other cultures are moving forward with green technologies and bring this knowledge back home.
She also says she would like to expose her two sons, Zachary and Matthew, to the rich history of Europe. “Experiencing European history helps us to situate ourselves in our point in time and makes us reflect upon how we conduct our daily lives,” she says.
If you would like to support Cooper’s efforts, you can donate to her current project, the Erin Water Rockers Fundraiser, which is raising funds for water bottle filling stations.