Sustainable Blue Economy Project Will Pilot 150 Internships For Youth Across Canada
HALIFAX – The Centre for Ocean Ventures and Entrepreneurship (COVE) in Dartmouth has joined Students on Ice and other organizations in a $2.4-million project that aims to get 2,500 youth, educators, and employers engaged with opportunities in industries related to the country’s oceans, rivers and lakes.
The Ocean Supercluster is providing $1.5 million to this second phase of Students on Ice’s Blue Futures Pathway program.
The program overall focuses on education, employment readiness and entrepreneurship in the sustainable blue economy for youth ages 18 to 30.
This phase will pilot at least 150 paid internships, with a particular focus on the inclusion of under-represented, remotely located, and Indigenous people.
COVE will primarily contribute its salaried staff time, build mentorship programs and training, and share its established internship program. As part of the Blue Futures Pathways program, COVE’s internship program, which is also open to international students, will double with a cohort of 20 set to start in May.
Sherry Scully, the executive director of COVE’s Workforce Initiative, said it’s important that youth, especially in Nova Scotia, take part in the blue economy.
“We’re a province that’s pretty much surrounded by the ocean and for so many generations, we’ve either explicitly or implicitly been kind of diverting our young people away from careers in the industry,” she said. “I think that there are so many people still with a lived experience of bust economies, whether it’s fishing or shipbuilding or others. So the industry sort of got a bit of a bad rap.”
The marine economy isn’t just commercial fishing or working in the navy, she said. Today, it includes everything from robotics and research to finance, design and marketing.
“For a long time, and for many people, when they think blue economy, they’re still thinking only about extracting things from the ocean, and they’re not really connecting it to the fact that it’s also about industries that support the ocean and that want to work in balance with it,” she said. “We want [the youth] to see that this is an industry that needs that really holistic kind of approach to doing a better job and to leading the industry.
“So they can see opportunities in their own regions, so they’re not thinking that they need to move away from the region to find interesting opportunities,” she added. “But it’s also just to get them engaged in the ocean, recreationally and socially, and as stewards of the ocean.”
She said companies that have taken part in COVE’s internship program in the past include Pisces Research Project Management Inc., DeepSense, and Precise Design, among others.
Companies of various sizes can take part in the program, and Scully is currently recruiting. She’s hoping that some of the mentorship program can be virtualized and the internship program can grow to the rest of Canada in the future.
Tara Mascarenhas, Students on Ice’s director of programs, said Blue Futures Pathway expands the definition of the blue economy to include fresh water bodies because Canada is home to 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. It’s also important to include Indigenous communities, she said, because “almost 70 percent of our coastline is in Indigenous communities, and many First Nations are positioned next to bodies of fresh water.”
“What’s really important to us is that anything we do that has to do with the blue economy is sustainable,” she said. “It needs to provide social, cultural, economic, as well as environmental benefits.”
She said the number of internships could grow if employers show interest and funding is still available.
The paid internships can vary in their set up. They can be summer jobs, co-op placements or full-time internships, said Mascarenhas.
The work varies from STEM-related ones to marketing and communications. They could be in remote communities, or in urban regions.
“It’s that whole spread of sustainable blue economy that are not just traditional [fields], like say, fisheries or aquaculture, but can also be related to technology, or science, or in the North, looking at relationships with ice, looking at Marine Protected Areas,” said Mascarenhas.
As part of this phase, Students on Ice will also build and manage a digital platform called The Port, which will be a one-stop-shop for educational, employment and entrepreneurship resources.
That would include the training, webinars and support network built in this second phase, as well as a database of educators, employers looking for workers, and youth who are looking for jobs in the sector.
Students on Ice aims to engage at least 250 employers on The Port.
The funding from Ocean Supercluster runs until August 2022, providing about 18 months of active internships, Mascarenhas said. Training and educational materials are set to be rolled out in the spring.
In phase three of Blue Futures Pathway, Students on Ice plans to focus on the entrepreneurship aspect of the blue economy.
Other key partners involved in the project include ECO Canada, which will help fund wages of interns and provide a water-related Building Environmental Aboriginal Human Resources (BEAHR) training for Indigenous youth, and MITACS, a non-profit research organization with a national reach that will provide funding for key regional staff.
Interested youth and employers can contact Mascarenhas.
“We will be looking for educators that are interested in educational materials, testing them, inputting into them. We’re looking for employers who are interested in youth and internships,” she said.