A former grade 7 student at Lacombe Junior High School was disappointed when their annual Heritage Fair was cancelled back in the spring due to the pandemic, one week before their 4th annual event was scheduled to take place.

Sierra Wyatt did her project on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) and the impact the 158-year-old institution has had on our country.

The annual Fair was something that students really looked forward to, and according to her Social Studies teacher Jeff Mason, Wyatt wasn’t about to let all of her hard work go to waste.

“I know that she was pretty disappointed with that. She had put in a lot of work into her project. The students were encouraged to still submit their projects (their presentations) online, and she did so. And then she was also encouraged to look to see if there was any kind of provincial or national competition, and so she and her family did that and they found this national competition for Heritage Fairs. She revised her project, paring it down to a 4-minute video presentation, and submitted that to the national competition and won the Alberta portion of that competition.”

Wyatt said she wasn't deterred by the cancellation of their heritage fair, and instead decided to take it to the next level.

“I had put so much work into this I didn’t want it to just sit in the attic and have nothing, so I decided to pursue it and I did a short video about it, and then I entered it into the Young Citizens and it just kind of took off from there.”

Wyatt met with the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta, the Honourable Lois Mitchell in Edmonton on Wednesday who presented her with her award.

The Young Citizens program, which was created back in 2012, is a Canada-wide program for students in grades k-12 who participate in Heritage Fairs. The students put their projects on video which are then posted online for Canadians to vote for. Each year, the winners head to Ottawa to have their work honoured as part of Canada’s History Forum.

With an interest in stocks and bonds that date back to when she was only 8-years-old, Wyatt got the idea from her mom, who works in finance, to do her project on the TSX, which was founded 6 years before Canada was officially a country.

“I want to be a stockbroker when I grow up, so that kind of thing was always very interesting to me. So when my brother actually won an award for his Heritage Fair two years ago, I had started brainstorming ideas for my Heritage Fair, and my mom came up with the idea for the Toronto Stock Exchange, and it was awesome.”

She’ll find out if she won the national part of the competition later on this year.

You can check out her presentation below.