Our hearts are full after our AGM at Strathcona Community Gardens last night! Over 20 community members, including donors and youth program alumni, joined us to celebrate our success and impact from the past year.

We’re thrilled to officially share with you our Annual Impact Report, where you can read about our work and impact in 2023 if you were not able to make it.

While we work to support each other through increasing financial challenges and collective grief, we’re so proud to witness urban youth apply their gifts to strengthen our communities. We depend on them to lead us and in reciprocity, they need us to show up for them. That’s why in 2023, we worked to grow our team’s capacity to better support East Vancouver’s youth in their journeys as environmental stewards and community leaders.

“The most important thing I learned in this program is that as a community we can help change our surroundings little by little. This is important to me because we can be the change we want to see in our society.” – Nature Stewards youth

Some other highlights include:

278 youth empowered from equity-denied communities.

15 youth completed employment training in environmental careers.

6 youth employed at EYA for our Youth Habitat Crew Summer job.

535 children and youth participated in field trips with their school.

3,844 native plants were grown by youth. This year was also one of our most expansive years for our Native Plant Nursery. We distributed 1,300 youth-grown plants across 21 school and community projects, 144 donor gardens, and several community events. We also expanded our Host-Nation Plant Gifts program, sharing culturally relevant plants with xʷməθkʷəyəm (Musqueam), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and Sḵwxwú7mesh (Squamish) Nations through three Plant Gift events.

We’re excited to see what this coming year has to offer and the impact our team and youth participants will have with the support of local partners.