Green care aims to cross rural-urban divide
Dr. Kendra Coulter confronts the need for decent jobs every day.
As a professor at Brock University’s Labour Studies Department, she routinely polls her students about what they want out of the workplace. Time and again, she gets the same answer: a stable paycheque, but also a sense of pride.
“They want to do good with their work,” she says.
Making that a possibility is at the heart of Coulter’s research. She has written extensively about how to improve working conditions in the retail industry. Now, she’s exploring an as-yet-unheard-of sector in Canada. It’s called green care, and Coulter believes it holds the potential for more jobs and better work.
“Too many jobs are bad for people, animals, and the environment,” says Coulter. “We have a lot of critiques in the academic literature of what’s wrong — but not enough research on alternatives and on solutions.”
