Jasper is home to one of Alberta’s Top 30 Under 30.
Last week, 21-year-old Doug Matthews was named in the fourth annual list published by the Alberta Council for Global Cooperation.
Matthews, a Jasper Junior/Senior High School graduate and alumni of the Jasper Sustainability Club for Youth, is now an Engineering Physics student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C. He is also the Education and Program Co-Director for the UBC chapter of Engineers Without Borders.
Although he learned the news back in December—as he was walking into his last exam of the fall semester—Matthews has kept it quiet until now, in anticipation of the magazine’s release.
“It’s definitely exciting,” he said on the phone from Prince George, where he’s currently completing a co-op placement with Industry Canada.
He said the news, which he received by email, pumped him up for success in that last exam and left him thinking “this is a big deal!”—a big deal for him and a big deal for all of his former classmates and teachers, without whom he said he wouldn’t have become the man he is today.
In particular, he pointed to his partners in crime in the sustainability club and two of his teachers from Jasper Junior/Senior High School.
“Teachers like Sandy Cox, who founded the Action Club, and Mr. Robb, who started the sustainability club—if those teachers weren’t there pushing us to push our boundaries, we wouldn’t be where we are today,” he said of himself and his former classmates.
“And I definitely would not have won this award without them.”
In fact, it was Robb who nominated Matthews for the distinction. The former Jasper Junior/Senior High School teacher said, although he had many students to choose from, Matthews was a clear choice.
“Doug was the one who was always there. He would show up for everything, no matter what it was, and put in his full effort and help organize everything.
“It’s nice to see him get some recognition because he is so modest—he always puts other people in front of him.”
Robb has known Matthews since he was a Grade 7 student and has collaborated with him on numerous projects and fundraising activities over the years.
“It’s just amazing how committed he is to everything: from Coats for Kids drives back in Grade 7 to dressing up as the mascot to fundraise at Jasper in January or to starvathons, whatever it was, Doug would take the lead and commit himself, and it’s now snowballed into bigger organizations and more notoriety and leadership opportunities for him.”
One of those bigger organizations is the UBC chapter of Engineers Without Borders. As with many things, Matthews attributes his participation in the student-led group to his former teacher Sandy Cox.
It was because of her that Engineers Without Borders came to Jasper when Matthews was in Grade 7, and that experience has never left him.
“We had a starvathon in the high school and Sandy Cox contacted the Engineers Without Borders chapter at the University of Alberta, and so they came to our school and presented during their reading week. That was what really got me into it. I really enjoyed those presentations.”
The engineers gave Jasper’s students an exercise where they broke up into groups and those groups were then assigned countries, as well as a budget that would correlate with their locations.
“Then the goal is to purchase goods and design a water filter,” said Matthews, who now facilitates the same exercise in schools around the Vancouver area and is helping to organize an engineering design competition and conference for students between Grades 10 and 12.
The reason Matthews involves himself in groups like Engineers Without Borders and the sustainability club is that it provides him an opportunity to show the power of young minds—something he thinks is often overlooked.
“I think adults often underestimate what students can actually do. I feel that even as a university student, they’re like, ‘oh, you’re not old enough to make these kinds of decisions yet.’”
But, if you look at the track record of the sustainability club for youth, which despite many roadblocks, has created dialogue and in some cases meaningful change, it’s clear there’s value in those voices.
And Matthews is willing to fight for them.
In recent months, he and a number of other sustainability club alumni, have renewed their dedication to the club in an effort to finish what they started in 2012.
From their respective new homes, the students have been tuning in to all of the club’s meetings via Skype and working together with current students and teachers to make a plan to finally get their SEED classroom to Jasper.
SEED is a direct result of the sustainability club. The students, while in Portland, Ore. for the Living Futures Conference in 2012, presented about their experiences working with the Alberta government on the design of Jasper’s new school.
It was after that presentation that they met Seattle-based sustainable architect Stacy Smedley, who was inspired by their story and wanted to help them achieve their goal of building a net-zero school.
That inspiration led to her to design the first SEED—a modular classroom that meets the stringent requirements of the Living Building Challenge.
Smedley hoped that through her own fundraising efforts she would be able to bring the prototype to Jasper. But, after running into difficulty raising the funds in Seattle, she was forced to sell it to another school in 2013 in order to cover her costs.
Reflecting on that experience, Matthews said it’s important that he and his classmates persevere and get a SEED to Jasper, no matter what it takes.
“Our club had a lot of failures, we always pushed for something and we never actually achieved it,” he said. “We pushed for our school to have a higher green building standard and we didn’t get that. Before that, the older students pushed for more influence in the community sustainability plan and that didn’t really work out for them, either.
“I really believe it’s better to fail trying than not try at all. But, sometimes you have to succeed or else you’ll stop trying. I think if we don’t succeed on this project it will discourage future students.”
And that’s not something that Matthews will stand for. As an advocate for youth engagement, he wants to ensure future generations are inspired to take risks and to believe in their own abilities.
It’s for that moment of enlightenment that Matthews stays engaged with the club, and it’s also the reason he volunteers with Engineers Without Borders.
Beyond graduating from UBC in 2018, Matthews said he doesn’t yet know where life will take him, but he does know one thing: he won’t end up in a cubicle.
“I think I want to work in a nice open office environment, and I just really want to make new technologies and invent something cool, I just don’t know what it is yet.
“I was actually talking to my friend Heidi Schaefer, who also graduated from Jasper a year before me, and we were like ‘we should start a green technology company.’
“We’ll see what happens, I’m leaving my options open right now and living in the moment and not necessarily thinking to the future yet.”
Whatever happens, the distinction of being one of the Top 30 Under 30 will certainly be on his resume.
Nicole Veerman
[email protected]
