Age: 39
Job Title: Director, Planning and Engineering, Town of Beaumont
Why She’s Top 40: She engages with students and members of the community to build more sustainable neighbourhoods
Early in her career, Eleanor Mohammed learned about people falling through melting ice, unusual insects and disturbances to hunting practices – all the result of climate change – at a conference in Nunavut. As a city planner who studied environmental management in university, that experience solidified the importance of planning ahead with the environment in mind.
Now, Mohammed is busy working on a municipal development plan and a transportation master plan in her position as director of planning and engineering for the town of Beaumont.
“All our policies and municipal plans are designed through a climate-change adaptation and mitigation lens,” Mohammed says. “So, building up instead of out, and Beaumont [launched] a regional transit system with commuter service into Edmonton.”
Prior to her current position, she worked for Leduc County – she created a workbook and a workshop with the Canadian Institute of Planners (CIP) that instructed students at the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Extension about ways to build a climate-change adaptation strategy. She’s still an instructor at the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Extension, and also the president of the CIP, which she represented at the prestigious United Nations Habitat III Conference in Ecuador last year.
Engagement is at the core of her everyday work. Her team worked with the community and stakeholders to land on a municipal development plan for Beaumont. And she developed a partnership with the U of A involving students with planning projects for the town, including a parking study, used to guide a development.
“As a general philosophy, I want to make sure anywhere that I work, I leave it a better community than when I came – in terms of built form, cultural opportunities, policy, and all that,” Mohammed says.
