Bryant Elementary was one of the schools included in our pilot program of the School…
IslandWood was honored to recently work on a project for the Northcoast Regional Land Trust (NRLT) to evaluate the curriculum of their environmental education programs in Humboldt County, California. Northcoast Regional Land Trust was seeking to serve more students and deepen students’ sense of environmental stewardship while using an equity lens – work that we are deeply passionate about. “In 2021, Northcoast Regional Land Trust staff began the process of expanding our environmental education programs. From the start, we worked with IslandWood to not only conduct a review of our current curriculums, but also engage community members in dialogue to better understand the ways in which our programs could grow to better support Humboldt County youth. IslandWood provided realistic suggestions for program expansion and worked to ensure all voices were uplifted in the community input portion of the project,” said Karlee Jewell, Project Manager, Northcoast Regional Land Trust. We examined the curriculum of two of their programs with input from the following people: We approached the review with a variety of guiding principles, including: Once we had the input and different perspectives of multiple reviewers, and identified where Next Generation Science Standards were present in NRLT’s programs, we offered recommendations including: Brad Street, IslandWood Senior Manager of Professional Development, and lead manager of the project shared, “It provided an opportunity to bring in the breadth of experiences across our organization around approaches to collaboration, centering the perspectives of students furthest from collaboration, incorporating agriculture into environmental education, priorities in curriculum design and staff training and even the logistics of registering programs and communicating with teachers. In particular, doing community member focus groups, and then working with the Northcoast Regional Land Trust on ways they might incorporate perspectives from tribal and Latinx community members and build their own relationships felt very meaningful and inspiring. I’m excited to see where the NRLT goes with their programming in the future and honored that IslandWood was able to play a part in their efforts to increase equity in their programs!” If you are interested in IslandWood consulting on your environmental education curriculum, please contact Brad Street. If you haven’t already, subscribe to our newsletter to stay in the know about blog posts, news, and events!