President’s Note – August 2024

It is with great pleasure, and no small amount of excitement, that I inform you that at our upcoming September 16th Members Meeting we will be hosting Jen Shears as our keynote speaker.

As a brief introduction, while Jen calls Newfoundland home, she is a salt-of-the-earth young woman, wife, mother, adventurer, business owner, blogger, and hunter. It was at this year’s BCWF AGM that I first met Jen as she was one of their keynote speakers. After hearing her speak, I looked around the table to meet the eyes of the other VFGPA executive members in attendance and there was an immediate consensus – Jen, with her multidisciplinary life experience, ease of speaking, and warm personality had our attention. So began my work to bring her out to Victoria for you to meet.

Jen’s formal education is in Environmental Biology and she lives that life to the fullest, being heavily involved in an outdoor lifestyle that includes such facets as seal and big game hunting, fishing, conservation, and diving in to what functional environmental sustainability really looks like from a front row, feet on the ground, perspective. She grew up in a hunting family with excellent role models, surrounded by “women who hunt”, and so has a multi-generational perspective and history of lived knowledge to share. She has hunted extensively in Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, and as soon as she booked her flight to come out to speak with us she also booked a sturgeon fishing trip to tag-on to her west coast trip (something she will soon be able to scratch off her bucket list).

I’ve now scratched the surface and given you a glimpse of who our upcoming guest speaker is.

I hope you will all join me at our September members meeting and give Jen a warm west coast welcome.

See you then,

Andrew

Andrew Lemon
President
VFGPA