Caroline Barlott

Sunny Kakar was in the sixth grade when Raj Malhotra walked into his Kameyosek School classroom in Mill Woods for the first time. They were both South Asian, first-generation Canadians, and they learned they were also distant cousins with matching extroverted personalities that thrived on parties and strong social bonds.

“We weren’t advertising this as a potential service,” says Mike Toffan. “People were literally seeking it out.” The service in question? Running rewilding projects on private and Indigenous land. At the time, Toffan was leading projects for a company that sells trees and works on reclamation at industrial sites. But he was getting frequent calls from private citizens about local land, and realized there was a huge gap in western Canada to help with personal rewilding projects.

The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y) is all about connections. It’s about connecting land through wildlife corridors so that animals can safely traverse huge areas for the purposes of roaming, feeding and reproducing. But it’s also about connecting with more than 700 different groups including industry, First Nations, government, volunteer community groups, land trusts and other conservation NGOs to protect and create nature-positive communities.