home > background

Background

YEP provides career benefits to members, new skills to volunteers, and great opportunities for mentors and sponsors to work with educated and intelligent young leaders. Highlights of our activities include:

• Establishing chapters in five cities.
• Involving over 2,700 young leaders across Canada.
• Building over 10 years of community-based experience.
• Delivering over 50 high quality, events every year.

Principles

YEP operates under three key principles - Education, Engagement, and Employment - as the foundation for its actions. 

The first principle for capacity building is education. YEP contributes to the education and increased capacity of its members by providing learning and development opportunities such as networking with other environmental professionals, monthly meetings, speaker sessions, workshops, and discussion forums. 

YEP's second founding principle is engagement, which YEP facilitates by establishing a forum for young and emerging environmental professionals to build relationships and find opportunities for leadership in their communities.  

YEP's third principle is employment, which is supported by connecting members with employers, circulating job opportunities, matching members with mentors, providing career toolkits, and hosting workshops.

Chapters

YEP chapters across Canada continue to build momentum and deliver valuable opportunities for members to learn, network with peers and mentors, find career information and opportunities, discuss public and business policy, and participate in community initiatives.

YEP has active chapters, Ottawa-Gatineau, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver (operating under the name Connecting Environmental Professionals). There are also emerging chapters in Victoria and Halifax.

Each YEP chapter is a not-for-profit, independent, volunteer organization with diverse membership. YEP provides a positive forum for young professionals to meet like-minded people who also have a commitment to the environment, their careers, and their communities.