Tin Roof gets local on water issues

Creemore-based non-profit organization Tin Roof Global has, to this point, been best known for its work in Uganda, which concentrates on installing rainwater collection systems at rural schools. But with the help of a $66,000 grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation received last December, Tin Roof has shifted part of its focus to local water stewardship, and the importance of teaching children the value of this precious resource.

“We’re really zeroing in on local water, and how it’s affected by things like quarries, development and landfills,” said John Millar, Tin Roof’s founder and executive director. “The question is, how do you help students in Grades 7 and 8 contextualize these issues?”

To that end, Tin Roof has launched an in-class workshop called “Gush,” and the Trillium funding will allow the organization to bring the workshop to 75 classes across the Simcoe County and York Region School Boards over the remainder of this school year and 125 more next year.

The program is extremely hands-on, and is divided into several modules that allow students to experience some of the complexity of water resource management.

In one module, students are asked to clean up a simulated oil spill by using a variety of different tools – cotton balls, j-cloths, anything that might soak up the oil sitting on the surface of the water. After discovering how difficult a challenge the clean-up is, they are provided with baking soda, which solidifies the oil and causes it to sink – a good approximation of a common real-world technique for dealing with large oil spills.

In another module, the water cycle is explored by boiling salt water and having a brave volunteer from the class drink the water that condenses from the steam – it’s freshwater, of course, because salt doesn’t evaporate.

A third module, perhaps the most intriguing, creates a conceptual model of a quarry in a number of tupperware buckets. Students are given various stakeholder roles – the quarry owner, the quarry employees, the neigbouring well owners, the environmentalists, even the bobolinks whose habitat is threatened. Rotating every minute, the stakeholders perform various duties – dewatering, adding water, taking aggregate, replacing vegetation – and within 10 minutes are all typically equally frustrated.

“We’re not anti-quarry – we all need aggregate,” said Millar. “But what this exercise teaches is that some properties may be better suited to quarries than others.”

Tin Roof has hired two people to deliver the workshops, including Creemore resident Caitlin Sumner.