I’m back!
I am excited to announce that I am taking Wapiti Studios to a full-time business starting in the spring of 2026!
Why?
Some of you may know that I put Wapiti Studios on hiatus in 2024 to focus on my new job as a Knowledge Exchange and Outreach Officer for the Canadian Forest Service. So what changed?
In short, I really missed being creative and collaborating closely with scientists on projects.
My job at the Northern Forestry Centre (NoFC), which I started in September 2022, was a totally new frontier for me: I’d never worked in government before, and I’d never had the chance to build a knowledge exchange program from the ground up. I learned a lot in that role and got to work with some truly awesome people. It was also such a healing experience, as NoFC is an office with a really outstanding sense of community - I found myself able to trust and lean on my manager and my coworkers much more than I had expected. I also got to see what it was like working on the other side of the equation: being the person contracting out science communication projects, as opposed to completing them myself.
The first couple of years in this position were really exciting. I was thrilled to bring my creativity into a group that hadn’t had knowledge exchange support for years. I started a newsletter and a social media channel, I developed training sessions to help the scientists sharpen their skills, I started a speaker series, I generated collaborations with science outreach partners like the Edmonton Valley Zoo and the Royal Alberta Museum. The sky was the limit, everything was fertile ground to start something!
But over time, I found that the job needed me to take a “30,000 foot view” and spend most of my time on high-level coordination, management and administration tasks (e.g., managing events and contractors). I was really missing the creative aspects of being in a service provider role and working directly with the scientists. There’s something about the creative process and the satisfaction of that collaborative output that can never quite be replaced for me. I found myself looking wistfully at the work of the contractors I was hiring, thinking to myself “I wish I was on that side of the table!”
I can’t emphasize enough what a great place NoFC was to work, though, and leaving is truly bittersweet. Although government has its downsides (which I’ve decided not to get into here, as that could be a whole post of its own!), I can honestly say this is the first job I’ve ever left not because of any issues I had with the workplace, but because of what I need within myself. I have a lot more thoughts about my government experience - the good, the bad, and the in-between - and I might share those in a separate blog post if folks are interested in more detail on that.
But for now, here I am, giving the business a “real shot” as they say! I am both excited and terrified, as I think most new business owners are.
What’s next?
Well, as you can imagine, I’m open for new contracts!
Based on the experiences and skills I’ve built over the last five years working for government and non-profits, I have also updated my service offerings. In addition to writing/editing and illustrating, I am now also offering:
Strategy and Planning: Content strategies and communications plans to guide your organization and get results.
Training: Level up your organization’s SciComm and knowledge exchange skills with a custom or pre-set training workshop.
These offerings are directly based on my experience developing communications plans and knowledge exchange strategies for multiple science-based organizations, as well as developing and delivering customized training for research scientists (and not to toot our own horn, but the “Making Effective Research Presentations” training workshop I’ve co-presented a few times now with my collaborator Naomi Louchouarn has gotten 5 out of 5 stars from most participants!).
I am also actively looking for collaborations! To highlight my existing collaborators and their expertise, I have created a new Collaborators page on this website. The more artists, communicators, subject matter experts, and engagement specialists I can team up with, the better. I am super excited to build these coalitions so we can tackle bigger, more ambitious projects than we could on our own. I am actively scanning all the government bidding databases and I am keen to help lead and organize proposals.
If you would like to get in touch with an idea, don’t hesitate to contact me - let’s talk!