Joan Kuyek has decades of experience helping to protect Canadian communities from the negative impacts of the mining industry. She will briefly share what she learned: how the Canadian industry is structured, how it maintains power, and how affected communities resist whether they want to stop a mine before it starts, to force governments to protect them, or to get an abandoned mine cleaned-up. 

Joan Kuyek is a community-focused mining analyst, community organizer and adult educator living in Ottawa.  She was the founding National Co-ordinator of MiningWatch Canada from 1999-2009. She is the author of Unearthing Justice: How to Protect your Community from the Mining Industry (fall 2019) and Community Organizing: A Holistic Approach (2011) and a number of other books and publications. Before moving to Ottawa, she was a community organizer and facilitator for almost 30 years in Sudbury and Kingston.