Academy Fellow Runs for Federal Office
Academy Fellow, Mike Morrice, has won the Green Party nomination for Kitchener Centre, and is now running as a Green Party of Canada candidate in this fall’s federal election.
Running on a campaign for a made-in-Canada Green New Deal, Mike has spent the last decade working to bring people together to shift to the green economy. As the founder of two effective climate-focused organizations, he truly gets the reality of climate change, and his training and experience with the Academy for Systems Change Fellowship program has prepared him to lead the tough conversations that need to happen about the power and structural realities that hold the current system in place.
When Mike was nominated to be an Academy Fellow in August 2017 (by Beth Hunter, a current Board Member of the Academy who graduated from our first cohort of Fellows in 2017), he was readying for a big transition.
Mike had founded Sustainable Waterloo Region in 2008 to engage local businesses in setting and achieving climate goals, and went on to create and lead Green Economy Canada (the national offspring of Sustainable Waterloo Region), which works directly with 230+ businesses across Ontario.
“When selected to be part of the second cohort, I didn’t know what was next, but I was confident that the 3-year span of the Academy Fellowship would support me through this transition”
During the first official gathering of all Fellows in his cohort, Mike was able to use methods introduced by Academy Faculty to create a vision for the future – one that included both moving on from Green Economy Canada (GEC) in a healthy way, and beginning to articulate what life could look like after GEC.
The mix of coaching, peer support and in-person time implemented in the Academy Fellowship program is less about training, and more about creating space and asking the questions needed for fellows to find their own pathway to inspire change in their personal lives, work environment, wider communities and globally.
“Even when I left our third Academy Fellows Gathering in Todos Santos, Mexico in December 2018, I didn’t know I was going to run. And that’s a big part of why I think the Academy is so special and so critical to my journey. No one was telling me what to do next. Instead, I was given a platform to discern both my question (what is the most effective and joyful way for me to contribute to the solution to the climate crisis?) and to move towards an answer in a way that feels so intentional and as a result, affirming.”
Having shifted his life direction for this, Mike is passionate about running a campaign focused on dreaming bigger, committed to meeting the scale of the challenges we face in a way that strengthens economic security, restores ecosystems, and truly improves the well-being of Kitchener-Centre residents, and all people in Canada.
“I refuse to settle for any approach where we either buy or build new infrastructure that will lock us into a future inconsistent with what climate scientists tell us is necessary for this planet to sustain human life as we know it.”
Today, Mike has no doubt that he is doing exactly what is at the core of his being, what energizes him, and what has the greatest potential for impact. And he feels he has that conviction in large part because of the time he spent together in-person with the Academy community, the support from his other Fellows, and the coaching from Charles Holmes (his one-on-one Academy coach).
“Being an Academy Fellow has not only been an incredible life experience, it’s been the foundation for the journey I’m now on. It’s the support I needed to guide me through this life transition, and it was pausing in our third gathering together last December that gave me the stillness to listen to the reality of the crises we face and decide to take action in this way.”
You can visit Mike’s campaign website here.