Help us create an environmental education program for 115 elementary school students, boys and girls. This program will get them hands on experience walking in nature, doing beach clean-ups, planting trees, building community gardens, recycling, and making compost. Through project based learning, we hope to empower our students to be part of the global effort to protect our planet for future generations.
The Los Algarrobos school is situated in Canoa, an isolated beach town community that depends on a precarious tourist economy. In Canoa, it is still normal to burn garbage or throw it just anywhere. Living next to the beach this is particularly worrisome for the health of the ocean. In the rural areas, many locals practice slash and burn agriculture. The government mandated curriculum teaches very little about the environment and the effect humans have on it, so we must create our own program!
This program will bring the urgency of environmental care to the students' attention by going outside of the classroom. When students face problems and create solutions with their own hands, they are empowered to make change. The program will work in three phases: 1) Love and appreciate nature 2) How to control human effect on nature and 3) How to regenerate vegetation where it is now destroyed. If this program is implemented annually, we hope to see significant cultural change.
Children are the source of effective change. This program would encourage students to change daily habits that effect their natural environment. As they become adults, we hope they will employ sustainable habits that little by little will create a cleaner, healthier environment for generations to come.
This project has provided additional documentation in a DOCX file (projdoc.docx).
