We Made the Front Page! From Pennies to Purpose: 35 years of Raven - A Whatsup Yukon Story

Reposted from WhatsUp Yukon.

By Ben Charland, Judy Dabbs and Janne Hicklin

This is the story of how a few people with a good idea and the will to put it into action changed the Yukon for the better

On a chilly Saturday morning in June 1989, a small group of friends arrived at the old Jim Light Arena in Whitehorse. They had booked a kiosk for the farmers’ market that summer with a simple idea: collect aluminum cans and pay a penny each.

Janne Hicklin and Anne Taylor stood behind that first collection table. They wondered, if recycling was happening elsewhere in the country, could it not happen in the Yukon too? After connecting with national environmental groups, the two women realized the answer was yes — but only if people like them made it happen.

This is the story of how a few people with a good idea and the will to put it into action changed the Yukon for the better. What seemed both modest and wildly ambitious at the time became the seed of something great: a community-led environmental effort in an era when recycling was merely gaining traction in the South and virtually non-existent in the North…