Raising a Climate-Conscious Family Through Everyday Action and Advocacy

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Cassy Midkiff, Maple Ridge, British Columbia (2nd Prize Winner: Our Daily Lives – Food & Stuff)

Cassy Midkiff lives with her husband, their two young children (ages two and four) and a dog in a semi-detached home in Maple Ridge. Employed full time and busy with her kids, Cassy consciously weaves climate action into the fabric of everyday family life. For her, sustainable living is not a side project. It’s a daily practice grounded in parenting, advocacy and community engagement.

Cassy won 2nd Prize in the “Our Daily Lives: Food & Stuff” category of the 2025 Live Net Zero Household Challenge for demonstrating how household consumption choices and civic engagement can reinforce each other. For Cassy, the Challenge was a platform to model change and amplify collective action.

Her transition unfolded over time. She composted food scraps, reduced meat, switched to reusable containers and shopping bags, and embraced thrifting and mending. As a parent, the motivation to live more sustainably deepened to cloth diapers and avoiding single-use plastic products. Her choices show how ordinary routines can reflect deeply held values.

Cassy notes that living in a more rural, hilly community with limited transit and bike infrastructure makes active transportation challenging, especially with children. Participating in the Challenge prompted reflection as her household transitioned to two vehicles due to work needs. Rather than accepting constraints passively, she has increased her engagement in local politics, advocating for better transit and active transportation options as her city grows.

Cassy believes change requires both personal responsibility and systemic reform. She actively takes part in local and federal climate groups, connecting household action with policy change. Through her involvement with the Maple Ridge Climate Hub and For Our Kids Canada, she participates in petitions, city council engagement, and protests, while modelling sustainable habits at home.

Her story illustrates that everyday choices, from cloth diapers to composting, are not isolated gestures. They are expressions of care, consistency and commitment. In a busy household with young children, Cassy recognizes that sustainable living is not about perfection. It is about choosing, again and again, to align actions with the future she wants her children to inherit.

Watch Cassy’s video reel on Instagram here.

 

Cassy’s entry:

Reflections from Cassy

Below, Cassy shares why she entered, what motivated her decision and how sustainable living shows up in her daily life.

Why did you enter the Live Net Zero Household Challenge?

I am a passionate climate activist who is a member of a few climate groups, one local to my city (Maple Ridge Climate Hub) and one that is a federal group (For Our Kids Canada). Over the years, I have adjusted so many things in my own household to reduce our emissions. As time has gone on, I’ve grown more and more passionate about spreading awareness to my community on how to make these changes, as well as getting more involved in civil moments (petitions, engaging with city council, attending protests) in order to enact change on a much larger scale. When I heard about this challenge through a fellow Climate Hub member, I knew it would be right up my alley!

What motivated your shift toward lower-consumption living?

When the UN’s Climate Report came out in 2016, I felt this sense of eco-anxiety I had never quite experienced before. This shifted something in me to re-evaluate how I exist in the world, what choices I am making in my purchases and habits, and how they ripple outwards to have lasting impact on the environment.

The changes I’ve made in my household weren’t all at once, and over the last decade I’ve become a homeowner and a mother, and that has gone into my change-making as well. As a parent in particular, I know it’s ‘easier’ when I feel like I have so little time to just order things on Amazon, choose the disposable option, buy new, etc. But I choose to live consciously, to slow down and reject the status quo. I do this FOR my children, I want them to grow up in a world as safe as the one I did – I want them to have a future. So when I choose, for example, cloth diapers over disposable, I choose the extra work for the very sake of my children.

What other sustainable actions are part of your life?

When I did this Challenge, it really made me reevaluate my transportation. Unfortunately, I live in a more rural community that is spread out and has very little public transit options (and is in a hilly area with basically no bike lanes, so active transportation is a hard option as well). I used to live in the city and didn’t even own a car – I bused and biked and walked everywhere, and I miss that so much. But it’s so challenging to do that where I live now, especially with children. This has led me to engage more with local politics as my city develops and considers more active and public transportation options – to add my voice to this push!

How has sharing your story made a difference?

My husband recently returned to working outside the house (and I work away from home as well), which meant we needed to become a two-car household. Participating in this Challenge reminded me to be more conscious in our footprint in making this decision. This resulted in us buying a used electric car!

We are all working together to protect the planet: my husband is just as passionate about conservation as I am and uplifts me in my activism work, and my kids are learning how to steward their environment through watching my husband and me!

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