Katherine Martin graduated from Wilfrid Laurier University with a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies and Honors in legal options. She is applying for her Master’s in Oceanography. Her favorite thing about school is learning; she loves to learn and strives to share what she knows with everyone! Her favorite courses always made her aware of socio-economic, historical, culture, and environmental discrepancies in our system. Katherine has always been one to stick up for the underdog, and sharing what she has learned through her legal, environmental, and indigenous courses. She shares her gained knowledge in order to keep people up to date on all the current events that are affecting our environment and overall planet.
Katherine applied to the Youth-to-Youth (Y2Y) program because she always had a passion for mending the bond between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. She believes that the most crucial step to reconciliation is learning how our ancestors have faulted and how we can make an actual change as a culture of youth.
The Y2Y is precisely the program to allow her to apply her knowledge of the environment and use it in a way to help address cultural issue between groups of people. Katharine is currently working on many different projects. One project is the Water Video, in which she interviews youth and some elderly individuals about the importance of water and why our youth should engage in the protection of it. Another project is the HIP beach cleanup. She is also working with the Sea Shepherd Conversation Society and the City of Toronto to organize a clean-up for our waters. Katherine is also working with John Currie on the HIP logo. She is part of the process of the creation of a new Rotaract Club; this club is being created to promote sustainability and environmentalism among youth.
Katherine enjoys her work with HIP because she can work on her passions and things that she cares about and can see that the organization is dedicated to the environmental and reconciliation process. Her work environment is a very open and welcoming community where she feels she is getting the opportunity to better herself while also doing the work she enjoys. Katherine’s goal is to become an oceanographer and work as a field researcher where the rest of Canada can learn how to properly care for our waters. Her other passions include animals, the environment, and social justice causes. Katharine is also passionate about empowering youths and seeing them flourish in their jobs, especially those dedicated to non-profits project such as HIP.
Katherine is also an avid swimmer and has her open water scuba diving license and swum with white tip reef sharks, nurse sharks, moray eels, many rays, stingrays, and eagle rays! Her passion and commitment to our water shines through the many projects that she is involved with.