Originally Published: 2009-03-15

Trent University will soon be home to one of Canada’s most sustainable buildings: the Camp Kawartha Environment Centre in Peterborough. The eco-friendly building will serve as a venue to teach children as well as future teachers. Construction will begin this April.
Jacob Rodenburg, the executive director of Camp Kawartha, and also a teacher at Trent University, came up with the idea for the new building. Rodenburg felt that it was necessary to create an environmental centre of this kind because future teachers, currently enrolled in teachers college, need a place where they can earn practical hands-on-experience to teach children about the environment.
“When you teach children to build a love for the environment, they’ll also want to protect it,” Rodenburg says. The building will represent a place where children will have the opportunity to learn about the environment, as well as learn about what they can do to protect it.
Rodenburg’s dream to build a sustainable environment centre will come true thanks in part to a generous donation of $100,000 by The Gainey Foundation, which was founded by Bob Gainey (general manager of the Montreal Canadiens and also a Peterborough native), and his family to honour both his late wife and daughter.
Chris Magwood, who founded The Sustainable Building Design and Construction Program at Fleming College in Haliburton, will take on the job of building the centre, with the help of his students.
“The program is unique for two reasons,” Magwood says. “Firstly, we make some of the world’s most sustainable buildings because we combine advanced and energy efficient mechanical systems with very natural, local and low-impact structural materials. Secondly, the students are completely responsible for the entire construction process for the public buildings we make. The combination of those two elements doesn’t happen anywhere else.”
The course taught by Magwood began in 2005, after he realized that there was a demand to learn how to build sustainable buildings. It is so popular that about 50 students every semester are placed on a waiting list (the program only accepts 26 students each year).

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