Angus Matthews





			ANGUS MATTHEWS

Angus Matthews was until May 2004, the Director of Special Projects at Lester B. Pearson College. He was the college administrator who was instrumental in the setting up of the racerocks.com project, and in taking the bold initiative in 1997 of refusing to see Race Rocks go un-staffed, by offering to the Canadian Coast Guard, the college as a committed steward of the environment.. His efforts at creating a Millennium grant proposal, and pulling together a team of experts to accomplish the racerocks.com project were usually not obvious but were always essential.

He negotiated with The Ministry of Environment for BC to assure a 30 year lease for occupancy of the island, in return for our commitment to help conserve the marine ecological reserve and promote it for education and research.

Angus is currently the Executive Director of the
New Marine Centre at Sidney on Vancouver Island.

Angus Matthews as skipper of Second Nature with students observing sea lions .

Angus's philosophy of the role of Educational Administrators can best be summed up by this quote from an entry he did for the administration section of the Apple Learning Interchange Gallery of Featured Exhibits .It presents further insight into his role in spearheading the" racerocks.com Project"

"It is important for school administrators to realize that the really big ideas in education can sometimes be the ones that take on an energy of their own and can actually become the easiest to implement. That has been our experience with the Race Rocks project. This has been a project which for some reason, has a destiny for success. We have experienced a remarkable synergy that resulted in the creation of racerocks.com. We don't doubt for a moment that other schools have experienced this as well. Administrators must always look beyond the day to day survival issues in schools and support educators and students when the opportunities for the really big ideas present themselves...".

You can hear Angus Matthews speaking about Race Rocks in QT Audio on this file which was done for the CBC program "Ideas"

Angus was also the college liaison for the series of meetings for the Race Rocks Advisory Board. His insight into the public use of sensitive ecological resources and the obligations of stewardship that we had for the area as a Marine Protected Area was invaluable.

The starting of the History section on racerocks.com was largely the idea on Angus Matthews. He obtained the historic images and researched the early history of the lightstation to start building our historic reference page.

It is because of the examples above and many other "behind the scenes"
interventions by Angus that "racerocks.com" exists today.

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