Weekend Warrier: The Community Energy Association’s new CEO Megan Lohmann skis to chill out

Megan Lohmann’s first taste of snow dates back to her toddler days in Lakefield, Ontario. “I’d be in my dad’s backpack while my parents cross-country skied. It became a way for our family to enjoy Ontario winters,” she says.

She got involved with the Jackrabbit cross-country skiing program—which helps young skiers across Canada develop their skills—then spent her teenage years competing in races where she’d ski anywhere from five to nine kilometres.

“During one of my last ra­ces—it was at an Ontario championship—I had a really big fall on a downhill that knocked me out,” she recalls. “My ski came off: you don’t normally lose cross-country skis, they’re quite tightly locked in, but it’s an example that I think back on a lot because I could’ve just stopped. But I didn’t. I got up, put my ski on and kept going, and still ended up in the top cohort of the race.

“It was an interruption that I hadn’t anticipated,” she adds. “Thinking back now, training my mind to overcome that and to be more resilient has been a lifelong lesson that seeded itself in everything else that I’ve done.”

In 2005, after Lohmann graduated from the University of Guelph with a bachelor’s degree in environmental science, she landed a job working with a contractor for Canada’s Department of National Defence. She was part of an environmental cleanup crew tasked with testing and remediating contaminated soil in the Arctic, and so was her future husband, Corin Lohmann.

“It was a very weird first job to have,” she admits. But the work changed the tides of her life in more ways than one: she immersed herself in the local lifestyle, went hunting with people from the Inuit community she was staying with and participated in community events like distributing (and tasting) a harvested whale. The turning point in her career, however, was when a scene from National Geographic materialized before her eyes.

“It was a very stereotypical situation that happened in that a starving polar bear was walking on the beach, and the Inuit were talking—it was the early 2000s—about the impact of global warming on their own food chain and food security,” Lohmann says. “That experience of being in a location that was feeling the early and accentuated effects of climate change steered my direction immediately toward the climate action realm.”

Shortly after that, Lohmann settled in Fernie with Corin. She got involved with the Community Energy Association—which helps local governments and Indigenous communities hit climate and energy targets—and later became its head of energy management in 2011. Some of Lohmann’s biggest projects with the nonprofit focused on increasing climate action in small-to-medium-sized communities, including developing EV charging infrastructure across the Kootenays and facilitating regional collaboration between communities. In 2024, she replaced Dale Littlejohn as CEO.

“Through this time, I’ve also been the president of the Fernie Nordic Society—for way too long,” Lohmann says with a laugh. “It’s one of those things where you volunteer and can’t get out of it.”

The Fernie Nordic Society is a cross-country ski club that just so happens to have launched the same year that Lohmann moved out west. She joined the board and helped build the city’s first cross-country skiing program for youth, which engaged 12 kids in its first year and now provides lessons and race programming to over 80. “I focused on the kids’ program because I wanted the kids in Fernie to have the same experience as I did growing up,” she says. “And as a result of my passion around this, I have forced my family to also become cross-country skiers.”

In 2023, Lohmann participated in the Western Canadian Championships in Kimberley with her two daughters. She placed second in the 40-50 age group for the 11-km classic race, and third in the 7-km skate ski race.

“I was very nervous beforehand,” she admits. “I couldn’t eat, and I had to do a lot of self-talk to calm down. But the reason that I enjoy pushing myself physically in these races is that it’s a release for me. A healthy way to deal with the pressure and stress that comes with a leadership position. I love to be in nature, so if I can blend my stress-coping and health benefits with something that also gets me into community, that is, for me, the trifecta of balance for my life.”

Warrior Spotlight

The Community Energy Association is a nonprofit that helps local governments and Indigenous communities implement climate and energy goals through planning, program delivery and capacity building. “Climate action is not just about climate; it’s about all the co-benefits that come with it—community development and health and wellness. And that’s really what we want to tap into,” says CEO Megan Lohmann, who has been with the organization for more than 13 years.

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