WEST Instructor, Community Advocate, Patron of the City

By Aly Winks

Craig Evans has been making an impact since he moved to Nanaimo in 1977. At 22, he was ready to find a place to call home and Nanaimo seemed to answer that calling. It wasn’t long before he put his money where his mouth was and opened Nanaimo’s first recycling operation called the Nanaimo Recycling Society.

“For years, I worked in the environmental movement, trying to enact change to make the world more sustainable and equitable. At the end of a seven-year struggle to establish a recycling depot in Nanaimo, it failed, and I felt burned out emotionally. For years I had taken my meager paycheck and gone to the store. I thought ‘I should just grow vegetables. It would be better than using my limited cash for these items’.” Evans says. “Once I was out of a job, I found that growing a vegetable garden was therapeutic and healing and I realized my next adventure involved learning to be a better grower.”

With this thought, he enrolled in the Greenhouse Technician program at VIU in 1985, learning everything he needed to know to keep the Nanaimo Community Gardens going, which he helped found in 1987.

His education, both at school and in the field, eventually led him to an instructor position at VIU in the Workplace Essential Skills and Training program, commonly referred to as WEST, and its predecessor the Employment and Life Skills Training program. The program spoke to him for its focus on inclusion.

“I was proud of the fact that here was a program not just oriented to the high marks and the top 10 per cent of the bell curve, but a program that was inclusive of members of the community who needed training in the essential life skills and work skills necessary for successful employment,” Evans says. “It’s an amazing program where the tuition can be paid through Adult Upgrading Grant funding if the student is recipient of a “PWD” Persons with Disability designation by the province. Clearly these are the most vulnerable of our society, and now they get a chance to attend University with all the benefits of a university student - the library card, joining student clubs, social life at campus, and tying in with the larger community.”

The program provides vital opportunities for vulnerable people and teaches them skills they can use to make money as well as meet their own needs, in Evans’ classes, this means growing food that can be sold as well as eaten. The students perform all the tasks required to harvest, from planting, to tending, to picking in a context where they are part of a team, developing the social skills that help make them employable.

Evans clearly understands the critical need of teaching people to be responsible for their own food security.

“It turned out that agriculture was and still is one of the biggest problems in trying to make the food supply safe and sustainable, so my focus became how to do that on the local level,” he says. “Everyone who enters a grocery store pays the same price for items in the store, no matter whether you make $7,000 per year or $700,000 per year. Clearly there had to be a more equitable way to share food to those in lower income levels.”

His dedication to improving food security and enriching the community was recently noted by the City of Nanaimo, which accorded him one of its highest honours.

At the beginning of January, he was designated Patron of the City by Mayor Leonard Krog.

“It’s quite an honour for me to receive this award, because in my youth, I was a bit of a pain to the City by trying to speak truth to power. At council meetings I would stand up and comment on development hearings and say thing like ‘I think it’s a bad idea to place the new landfill site closer to the Nanaimo River than the old site’, or ‘This multimillion-dollar project will contribute to poisoning the environment and add to our airsheds already overloaded particulate levels that make breathing air a health hazard. Please reject this proposal.’ I always tried to be respectful to council members and city staff. Just because we disagree, doesn’t mean you have to be rude to each other. For me it’s a re-evaluation of my role during those times and how time sometimes makes hindsight the best teacher to steer future endeavors.”

In its release on the award the City stated “With enthusiastic dedication to local, sustainable food production, Mr. Evans is credited as the founder of the Nanaimo Community Gardens in 1987, the Nanaimo Foodshare Society in 1997 and the VIU Farmers Market in 2013. He also co-founded the Growing Opportunities Farm Community Co-op in 2009 and the Farmship Growers Cooperative in 2013… His advocacy efforts halted plans for a proposed ferrochromium plant at Jack Point and a BRINI waste incinerator in 1991. From 2013-2015, Mr. Evans was a Director for the Colliery Dams Preservation Society which successfully sought to protect and preserve Colliery Dam Park. In 2000, Mr. Evans began working at Vancouver Island University as a Worksite Trainer for the Employment and Life Skills Training Program. He currently works in the Work Essential Skills Training (WEST) Program, mentoring students with diverse abilities and securing them work training sites.

A few sentences packed with a wide range of accomplishments, all focused on the health and wellbeing of the broader community. For Evans, the timing of the award was not a second too early. He has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and shared with us that he does not expect to see his last crop of winter vegetables harvested from Cline Farm.

When asked what his final message would be to the VIU community, he shared:

Keep up the good work team! Universities have a vital role to play in our civil society, and we seem to know that and work with that in mind. Thank you for all that you taught me and enabled me to do during my tenure there. Take Care!!