Introducing The Scurry: An eNewsletter for Seed Enthusiasts
The Scurry is an eNewsletter created by the Squiirrel team and led by Blaine Pearson and Julian Caspari, aimed at connecting seed enthusiasts and fostering community dialogue. With a focus on tackling the climate and biodiversity poly-crisis, this eNewsletter amasses and shares tools to empower the native seed supply sector and advocate for planting healthy and biodiverse forests. Learn about how The Scurry came to be in this letter from Blaine and Julian.
Hi everyone,
Thanks for clicking through to read this first installment of The Scurry: An Email for Seed Enthusiasts. A scurry is the name for a group of unrelated squirrels, and since we’re hoping to connect all seed enthusiasts with rich dialogue and a sense of community, we felt the name to be appropriate 🙂.
As we get rolling, we wanted to provide a brief introduction to ourselves and our work. ‘We’ are Blaine Pearson and Julian Caspari and we are the people leading the charge on bringing Squiirrel to life. Throughout our careers we’ve both always sought to engage in projects that support or help heal our planet and people. Julian spent over a decade leading Schools Without Borders, bringing social and environmental justice curriculum to life. Today, he is the Sustainability Lead at Accenture Canada. Blaine is a serial entrepreneur having led start ups in marketing and communications, cannabis, and most recently as the CEO and Co-Founder of Wilder Climate Solutions.
For us, it all started with a seed. When Blaine started collecting seeds and looking for buyers, she unearthed a whole universe of questions about the industry. From here, working with Julian and with the support of Accenture, their curiosity was set free. We launched a national survey to learn more, spoke with dozens of practitioners across the country, and completed a collaborative research report which deepened our desire to unleash the potential of the community working to plant healthy and biodiverse forests for decades to come. After publishing the Growing Future Forests report in February of 2023 we knew we had to keep going and do what we could to contribute to solutions.
So, we’ve gone all in on learning about native seed supply and trying to create a set of tools that will create capacity across the sector and, most importantly, to urgently address the impacts of the twin climate and biodiversity crises.
We recognize that this is the first step in a long journey and we look forward to collaborating with anyone who is similarly inclined to solve these challenges. It’s going to take all of us pulling together in the same direction to get where we need to go.
So in the spirit of a relay, it’s with great excitement that we say ‘ready, set, let’s go!’
Blaine and Julian