Employer Spotlight: City of Kelowna Scales Sustainability Projects with UBCO Co-op Students

Organization Name: City of Kelowna 

Industry Sector: Municipal Government 

Company Size: 1400 People 

Location (City/Region): Kelowna, BC 

Representative Name & Role: Thomas Martin, Urban Forester 

Years of Partnership with UBCO Co-op: 1 

Tell us about your organization and what drives your work. 

At the City of Kelowna, our mission is to be a welcoming and successful community that respects the nature that shapes our identity. This includes creating resiliency and protecting our environment while our city continues to grow.  

For the Urban Forestry department, this specifically means continuing to expand our urban forest, while preserving our natural areas. We hold the City’s urban forest to a high standard, while creating nature-based solutions that help our community mitigate and adapt to a changing climate.  

 Contributing to the local community means maintaining the stewardship of natural resources through wildfire mitigation, GIS data management, and integrated pest management. A large piece of our work is maintaining natural area access, for both trail use and educational opportunities. We strive to be a community of leaders, completing projects based on scientific evidence.  

A recent example of this was the prescribed burning at Knox Mountain Park, conducted for wildfire risk reduction as well as ecological restoration. These projects have direct contributions to the community, protecting our ecosystem for the future.   

How are co-op students meaningfully integrated into your team? 

We integrate students by giving them ownership of specific tasks or components of projects. As their confidence grows, they take on more complex responsibilities and collaborate with other team members, which helps them build independence while still working within a supportive team structure. Throughout co-op terms, students help conduct extensive planning and preparation for prescribed burning within the city. For example, in collaboration with UBC’s Forestry Program students took vegetation and horticulture data from Knox Mountain and then compared it with the same data after prescribed burns. This highlights how students gain experience in fieldwork, where they are given hands-on tasks and encouraged to think critically about operations and the results. Students also have the chance for a variety of other environmental fieldwork, like completing various service requests to combat invasives, inspecting sites for tree planting, assessing private trees for damage, and more.  

Beyond the technical aspects of the job, students develop interdepartmental communication skills that allow them to effectively communicate and work with other groups. During community engagements, co-op students answered questions and concerns from the public and demonstrated the importance and ecological benefits of prescribed fire in the Okanagan.   

On the Urban Forestry team in the City of Kelowna, we value professional development. This includes supporting students in exploring areas of interest beyond the scope of the original job description.  Our current co-op student has been digitizing Kelowna’s trail system using GIS informatics and working to decommission unsafe trails for people and local biodiversity. This came from an interest in learning more about GIS work, as well as a passion for local trail systems.   

What impact have co-op students had on your organization? 

Our 2025 UBCO Co-op student, Sara Hagarty (BSc. Biology), made a big impact as a key member of the Natural Areas team at Kelowna Parks Services. Through her leadership on the citywide trail inventory and assessment project, Sara developed a comprehensive GIS database that will guide future planning and improvements across Kelowna’s trail network as she logged an astounding 225km of trail running and hiking during this project!  

Sara also had a significant role in helping plan Kelowna’s first season of prescribed fires which advanced our capacity for evidence-based natural area management and ecological monitoring through her collaboration with UBCO’s Assistant Professor Dr. Jen Baron. 

In addition, Sara played a pivotal role in the City’s Sustainable Forestry Initiative certification, coordinating with multiple departments to compile and present audit documentation that supports Kelowna’s goal of becoming the first municipality in Western Canada to achieve this sustainability standard. 

Sara’s initiative, technical expertise, and cross-departmental collaboration have left a lasting contribution to both our team and the city’s broader environmental stewardship goals. 

How do Co-op students contribute to your team’s operations or capacity? 

The ability to hire a student for an 8-month term allows students to take on larger projects and more responsibility, which allows the core team to focus and complete other projects while the student handles other projects. Having a student for an 8-month term allows us to offer sustainable pace to training and onboarding. An 8-month term allows for a training period and then time to finish significant projects. This was further complemented by the nature (pun intended) of urban forestry work – the summer months are ideal for field work, and the fall and winter are ideal to catch up on report writing and data analysis. Furthermore, the kind of work we do requires a range of skills and responsibilities. This means that it is critical for our employees to be adaptable, and self-starters, and by partnering with UBCO Co-op, the City of Kelowna gains access to students from diverse fields of studies and backgrounds. 

What would you say to other companies considering hiring a co-op student? 

I have three tips for other companies: 

• Tip #1: Hire a co-op student! 

• Tip #2: Have a few key projects lined up for them to take a lead role in. 

• Tip #3: Look for potential along with “soft” skills on their resumes. These students are still in their undergrad. It’s irrational to expect them to come in with 10 years of experience. However, they can be motivated, hardworking, and come up with additional relevant skills or experience — leadership in campus groups, customer service experience, outdoor experience, and more. 

This generation of students are hardworking, smart, and keen to put in the work to gain experience.