Maureen Lipkewich

  • Founder and Former Board Member

    Maureen Lipkewich was a life-long member of BC’s mining community and co-founder of MineralsEd. She grew up in Merritt, BC and having “married a miner”, moved with her family from Merritt to Kamloops to Tumbler Ridge and Vancouver, eventually retiring to a ranch near Kamloops.

    Maureen was working as a volunteer with the Mining Association of BC in the late 1980s and began crossing paths with teachers at career fairs who informed her that they did not have up to date and useful materials to teach about mining in school. She began searching for a solution, a path that led her to the BC Ministry of Education, the BC Teachers Federation, and the Social Studies PSA. In the PSA, she met Coquitlam teacher Bruce Kiloh with whom she teamed up to create MineralsEd in 1991. Together they drafted a formal teacher-industry partnership dedicated to supporting teachers in their development of resources to teach about Earth Science, mineral resources and mining in school at all grade levels where there was opportunity in the curriculum.

    Motivated by a genuine sense of importance of youth having opportunity to learn about mining, an admiration for the commitment and role of classroom teachers, and belief in the worth of the mining industry and its people, Maureen built a MineralsEd team of partner-teachers who developed eight stand-alone resources on minerals, mining and geoscience matched to BC curriculum from kindergarten to grade twelve. These teacher-written units, and the way they were developed and shared with teachers around BC, remain at the heart of MineralsEd.

    Maureen served as the MineralsEd Director from its inception until 2003. Her role in the brilliant and effective creation of MineralsEd garnered Mrs. Lipkewich several awards: 1991, Mining Person of The Year; 1994/95 - CIM Distinguished Lecturer; 1996 - Mining Association of Canada-Keep Mining in Canada - New Faces in Mining; 1998- Order of Sancta Barbara – CIMM Centennial; and 1998 - Nominee – Women of Distinction – category – Education and Training.