Five new projects to bring ocean awareness to Ottawa

Kimberley Dunn

These five new Ottawa Wave Maker projects will receive funding to help raise awareness this summer about Canada’s oceans in the nation’s capital, including a sustainable-seafood dining guide and microbead testing in the Ottawa River.

A participant examines an eel at a 2015 Wave Maker’s event. © Riverkeeper
A participant examines an eel at a 2015 Wave Maker’s event. © Ottawa Riverkeeper

Fou d’Sea Food: Laurence Pechadre will create a bilingual, interactive and intergenerational activity guide to help families discover how the decisions they make in Ottawa can keep fish and oceans healthy.
Banning the Bead: Meaghan Murphy, staff scientist at Ottawa Riverkeeper, will mobilize Ottawans to conduct the first ever data-sampling for microbead/microplastic pollution in the Ottawa River. The project includes a media campaign to educate communities and consumers about the issue of microplastics that originate in our local rivers and make their way to the ocean.
Your Boat – Kichiman: Mike Grigoriev from the Ottawa City Woodshop, a shared community workshop, will work with Algonquin elders, students, craftspeople and the broader community to collaboratively build an Algonquin-style traditional birch-bark canoe to increase awareness about healthy waterways, from rivers to the oceans and back.
Transparent Kitchen: Transparent Kitchen, a start-up founded by Frazer Nagy that offers digital services to independent restaurants, will add a sustainable seafood section to the digital dining guide, enabling Ottawa restaurants to showcase the supply chain for the sustainable seafood on their menus. It will also help diners choose local restaurants that serve sustainable seafood.
Ocean Explorer’s Test Kit: Kat Kavanagh of Water Rangers will create test kits for citizen scientists to take to the ocean to help them understand what makes oceans healthy. The project includes the kit, field guide, in-person training sessions and an online video.

What are Wave Makers anyway?

Ottawa Wave Makers is a partnership between WWF-Canada and Impact Hub Ottawa (a community space and social-change network). The partnership funds projects that help raise awareness about Canada’s oceans in the nation’s capital.
Ottawa Wave Makers looks for the best ideas to get people thinking, talking and caring about healthy oceans, from videos to workshops to art installations. The initiative was launched in 2015, and the first Ottawa Wave Makers projects reached thousands of people across the city.
Applications were up about 50 per cent over last year, with ideas pouring in from entrepreneurs, artists and community groups from every corner of the city. In the end, five outstanding projects,  to be completed over the next five months, received a combined total of $30,000 in funding under this year’s program.
We’d like to send a big thank-you to everyone who applied, and to the judges and community groups who helped us get the word out. Congratulations to all the 2016 winners.
Stay tuned to learn more about the 2016 projects as they take shape. You can also keep up with the latest Ottawa Wave Makers news by following #OttWaveMakers on Twitter and on Tagboard.