Ramona Boyle: Quadra ICAN’s new Coordinator

Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents - Quadra ICAN recently hired Ramona Boyle as the Coordinator to oversee their operations. This was advertised as a part time position, which is expected to take approximately 40 hours a month. Cortes Currents asked the Heriot Bay resident about her new role.

“After I was interviewed for the job, I was told that the reason that I got it is because of my intense practicality. I'm a problem solver and I get things done,” she explained. “When I first started working with ICAN about two years ago, some of the people came to my property here and they looked around at what I had built. I have goats, chickens, ducks, rabbits, a huge garden and water collection system. All kinds of systems that didn't exist before. The property was in quite rundown condition when we bought it. I don't have a lot of money and I don't have certain skills, but if I needed it, I learned it. So we had to build a barn. I learned how to build a barn and put a roof on it, learned how to do a water collection system and learned how to repair a flooded roof. I'm pretty practical.”

Cortes Currents: What will you do as ICAN’s Coordinator?

Ramona Boyle: “I think ICAN is a really important enterprise in the community because it brings together over a hundred registered members who each participate in what they're passionate about.”

“I came to ICAN through the food security team that works to create access to nutritious local food, to reduce reliance on food that has to be brought in by truck to the island.There is a team that is focused on water security, another one that's focused on transportation and another that's focused on energy. Each of these committees has its own focus and energy that comes to it, which I find very energizing. It's not a top down organization that tells us, do this, do this, do this. It's very much people in the community who say, 'this is what would make the community stronger, better, more resilient in the face of climate change or economic change.’”

“I think that my job as coordinator is to keep that energy burning and to focus it into projects that come to fruition. It's that connection between having an idea, having a passion for something, and then getting it done so that it's a working solution.”

“It's early days to see how it's going to work in practice, but part of it is sitting in on each of these action committees as an observer to identify where there are bottlenecks to a project moving forward and then clearing that for them. Whatever is needed, if it's a, a permit, then it's my job to ensure that the necessary permits are in place or to apply for funding if that's what's needed, or to gather together a pool of volunteers for a particular project.”

“First is just to watch and see what you need cleared out of the way, so that you can make your vision real. That's my job. I view myself as the locomotive of the train that says, ‘get out of the way so that the train can go through.’”

“Sometimes those barriers are not external. Sometimes it's a matter of tweaking a vision. For example, when the Library of Things was first imagined a couple of years ago, we began to see information about it, got very excited, but then it didn't happen. That was frustrating for a lot of community members who are like, ‘darn it! I need a lawnmower now.’”

“What we discovered when we stepped back and looked at it was that the Library of Things was working in one direction and at the same time, the food recovery team was developing a lending cupboard of food preservation materials. It didn't make sense to have two separate lending locations. I don't think people differentiate in their mind between, I need a lawnmower and I need a pressure canner: they're tools. So putting those two things together and ensuring that those two groups coordinated on it was one way of moving it forward to actually happening so that you're not duplicating, for example, computer systems for monitoring.”