is to support all matters related to educating nurses, the public, and other health professionals on planetary health and related issues. This includes climate change, biodiversity, pollution etc.
This group helps support the development of nursing curricula, the organization of educational webinars for members, and has created tools that help nurses learn about planetary health (such as the Nursing Toolkit for Planetary Health with partner group Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions and the Radon assessment tool in association with Health Canada).
The committee is collaborating with other CANE committees on several projects including a new initiative co-led by this committee and the Environmental Justice and Reconciliation committee to create educational podcasts. Members are also involved in educational and curricular projects at their workplaces for colleagues, students and staff members and also regularly present at conferences and contribute to publications. The committee is always looking for new ideas and interesting projects.
The Environmental Justice and Reconciliation committee seeks to fulfill the following objectives in CANE’s Constitution:
Alysha (she/her) is a white settler, community health nurse and clinical nurse educator, currently working in a community health centre in W̱SÁNEĆ and lək̓ʷəŋən peoples territories in so-called Victoria, BC. In addition to nursing, Alysha has a background in ecopsychology and is most interested in planetary health within the frame of environmental and climate justice.
For grant funding, members of this committee seek out opportunities, support the application processes, and direct opportunities to other CANE committees/members/or external experts that can join the teams ultimately needed to carry out the related grant activities.
For fundraising, members work together to brainstorm ideas, reach out to partners if needed, locate supporting resources, and carry out fundraising activities.
This includes management of member satisfaction, as well as recruitment of new members and promotion of the organization. As per CANE’s Strategic Plan, increased membership will assist in enhancing organizational resiliency by generating funding, support for CANE’s activities, and overall promotion of the organization.
The Membership Committee will work closely with the Social Media Advocacy Committee in order to promote and showcase CANE via social media.
The committee’s objective is to develop relevant internal policies with the direction of the Board of Directors. This is accomplished by small group work, research-based advice, and expertise-seeking.
Two policies have been approved by the Board: 1) CANE Ethical Donation Policy; and 2) CANE Remuneration for Services Policy.
Currently, we are actively working on the CANE Digital Content & social media Policy and the CANE Advocacy Policy. The longer-term goal is to develop the CANE Code of Conduct and many other important policies that help guide CANE’s work.
We aim to do this work by amplifying the nursing voice and providing nurses with tools to act on these topics.
This is done primarily through the publication of op-eds in mainstream newspapers, articles for publication in nursing journals and development of various toolkits for government elections.
that allows nurses to voice their concerns on the health impacts of climate change on the populations they serve. A secondary role will be to amplify the voice of other healthcare professionals provincially, nationally, and internationally who partner with CANE towards the mutual goal of safeguarding the health of people and our planet.
In summary, for the SMAC Committee, social media is the platform to engender climate change and Planetary Health advocacy by nurses.
If you haven’t yet followed CANE on our social media platforms please do so and remember to spread the word!
Please follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram where you can like and share our posts!
This committee is still in its infancy. This committee will look at sustainability from the micro, meso, and macro levels of health care and try to enact change from both bottom-up and top-down approaches. Unlike other CANE committees, this committee will be open to non-CANE members because we understand that to truly support planetary health, we need an intersectoral approach.
The longer-term goal for this committee is that there are enough members with different interest areas to create sub-committees that work on tackling specific planetary health issues in health care (food sustainability, sustainable medication usage, energy, divestment) etc.