Candice Steven is a passionate outdoor enthusiast with over two decades’ experience leading outdoor adventures and nature connection activities and learning opportunities for youth and visitors. She is passionate about kayaking, nature connection, conservation and education.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in education (BEd) from Vancouver Island University and has dedicated her career to initiating and facilitating alternative education programs for youth, including Tofino Heartwood, a collaborative distributed learning program, and Tofino Nature Kids.

From Dutch Mennonite and Scottish ancestry, she feels extremely grateful and blessed to have been born, raised, and to currently live, work, play and learn, in the unceded territory of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The land and waters have been her greatest teachers and have guided and inspired her learning journey.

She is a proud and devoted mother of three and is dedicated to reconciliation and fostering learning environments rooted in Indigenous pedagogies. She is learning to see and teach “With Two Eyes”.

At the IISAAK OLAM Foundation, Candice supports the Indigenous Climate Action Program, helping a community of BC educators who are seeking to action reconciliation in the classroom, and working with community partners with a nature education mandate who want to be stronger allies of Indigenous Peoples.

In the words of Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall, this involves “braiding the strengths of Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives together to inspire everyone to nurture respectful, reciprocal, responsible relationships with each other and with the Land and Water, plant-life, animals and other-than-human beings for the benefit of all, by engaging spirit, heart, mind and body together.”