Gabriel Dalton

Gabriel Dalton founded Oasis of Change in March 2024, a Vancouver nonprofit focused on digital sustainability: the environmental cost of websites, data transfer, and the devices that run them. He started coding at 10 and spent the next several years trying to understand why most of the internet’s footprint is invisible to the people using it.

His work outside Oasis of Change has shaped the same thinking. He has contributed to Stanley Park Ecology Society on community conservation and education, supported Plastic Bank’s efforts to recover ocean-bound plastic waste, and served as a National Coach (Fellow) at The Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University, where he helped deliver Screen Break (now called Heads Up!), a program on young people’s relationship with technology, attention, and wellbeing.

Through Oasis of Change, Gabriel works with nonprofits and community organizations to rebuild their websites so they use less energy. On the Mittler Senior Technology project, the site’s carbon emissions, energy use, and water consumption each fell by about 90%, even though it was already running on green hosting. Other client projects have reached reductions of up to 98%.

The organization’s reforestation program has grown alongside that. In the 2025–2026 fiscal year, Oasis of Change funded the planting of 7,144 trees across 14 countries on 6 continents, offsetting roughly 358,750 kg of CO₂ over the trees’ lifetime.

In 2025, Gabriel received the Youth Impact in Innovation Award at the City of Vancouver’s Awards of Excellence. In February 2026, he spoke at TEDxEcole Mission Secondary on “Digital Sustainability: The Missing Piece of Tech and AI Literacy.”