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Lipsitz and his fellow volunteers delivered workshops and healthy meal planning, food composition and gardening.

Last month a team of U of T volunteers — including engineering student Yonatan Lipsitz (IBBME PhD candidate) — partnered with Sandy Lake First Nation in Northern Ontario to deliver a series of workshops aimed at reducing the high rates of Type II diabetes in the community.

“Seeing young people get excited about doing cool new science and engineering is a great feeling, particularly in the Sandy Lake community where the students are so eager to do science themselves,” said Lipsitz. “It is great to be up there and sharing my passion with them.”

At Sandy Lake, more than a quarter of the population is living with Type II diabetes, about five times higher than the average for Canada’s non-Indigenous population. When the ground is frozen, one can drive to Sandy Lake over a winter road, but for most of the year people and supplies must be flown in. The high cost of importing food by air makes it difficult for community members to maintain a balanced diet, contributing to the development of health problems such as diabetes.

In response, the community created the Sandy Lake Health and Diabetes Program (SLHDP), which conducts events and activities to raise awareness and promote healthy lifestyles. For the past five years, the SLHDP has partnered with U of T through the science outreach organization Let’s Talk Science to deliver educational programming about diabetes to youth in the community.

“Let’s Talk Science gives our children opportunities to learn that they wouldn’t otherwise have as a remote community,” said Gary Manoakeesic, who works with the Sandy Lake Health and Diabetes Program. “The volunteers have incorporated their materials with our curriculum, and we are working together for the future.”

The team from Let’s Talk Science included Lipsitz as well as physiology graduate students Kirusanthy Kaneshwaran and Dhekra Al-Basha and a logistical support network of volunteers in Toronto. Over the course of five days, the team worked closely with Manoakeesic and his colleague Elliot Fiddler, as well as other community members at Sandy Lake, to deliver 30 one-hour workshops reaching more than 500 students in Grades 3 through 10. Topics included healthy meal planning, food composition and local gardening. Both children and adults in the community also took part in science and engineering activities, including learning about the night sky in an astronomy workshop.

Lipsitz and his fellow volunteers delivered workshops and healthy meal planning, food composition and gardening.
Lipsitz and his fellow volunteers delivered workshops and healthy meal planning, food composition and gardening.

“We wanted to get the children excited about growing their own healthy foods as a solution to the high cost of fruits and vegetables in their community,” said Lipsitz. “Though it’s a lot further north, the climate is still warm enough to grow many of the same vegetables that we do in more southern areas of Ontario.”

This Let’s Talk Science project received support from the Engineering Outreach office. Each year, summer camps and workshops presented by teams of undergraduate and graduate students in Engineering Outreach engage more than 7,000 students from across Canada and around the world. In addition to educational outreach, many U of T Engineering students participate in development projects run by groups such as Engineers Without Borders and Bridges to Prosperity which impact developing communities overseas.

This is the second year Lipstiz has participated in the Sandy Lake project with Let’s Talk Science, and he hopes the partnership will continue. “We expanded the program quite a bit this year, and we hope to expand it even further,” he says.

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