Locals and visitors alike are once again being invited to experience our city in a new way via a series of walkable, cyclable, self-guided audio tours with a sustainability theme.
Sustainability Stories was created by the Community Alliance for a Resilient Kamloops, a loose partnership of local groups and individuals interested in supporting and celebrating local sustainability initiatives. Signage at various locations features a QR code, scannable with a smartphone, which links users to the website (tinyurl.com/yun8chb3). Listeners can click on the audio and enjoy a 5-minute story at each site.
The second tour, to be launched for Earth Day (April 22), focuses on the North Shore area. Each of the four stops highlights an enterprise, business or infrastructure that features an aspect of sustainability. The tour can be done all at once, or a stop or two at a time, in any order. Stops can also be “discovered” randomly by spotting the signs bearing the QR code. This new tour expands from the original Downtown Tour launched last summer.
The working group and story creators have drawn on their own experiences of sustainability: activities or organizations with which they have had involvement or businesses they have frequented.
“We wanted to focus on potential and current solutions, however experimental and tentative, and to connect people to the landscape,” says Kim Naqvi, one of the program’s creators. “Whatever change occurs will also be carried out by everyday people in their everyday lives, thinking about how they work, play, and shop. New experiments and new ideas will shape the city of the future. They need to come from us and from our discussions and practice.”
“The stories complement the City’s Community Climate Action Plan, which was adopted in 2021,” says Deb Alore, another creator. “Sustainability is integrated into every facet of our community. By raising awareness of how we interact with each other and with the land around us, we’ll hopefully sow some seeds and get more of us talking about how we want Kamloops to develop in a healthy way in the future.”
“We’d like to continue adding new stories to the tour and explore other areas of Kamloops,” says Alore. “It’s also important to point out that these stories were written and produced on the unceded, traditional territory of the Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc, and we are looking forward to sharing our platform with Secwe̓pemc storytellers, who have been living sustainably in this valley since time immemorial.”
Do you have a Sustainability Story to share? Get in touch!
This project benefited from a Social Planning Grant received by the Kamloops Naturalist Club and with support from the City of Kamloops Sustainability Division.