“If we really want to impact our community and make a real change, we must work together to maximize limited resources.”
To elevate awareness and ignite action around our community’s social, economic, and environmental issues, we periodically feature local thought leaders to enhance the stories and data analyzed in our Boulder County TRENDS Report. This month, we’re pleased to feature Rafael Salgado, Executive Director of the Cal-Wood Education Center, a grantee of the Community Foundation’s Community Trust.
I grew up playing outside and developing a love for the outdoors in my small town in Michoacán, México, surrounded by natural areas and a lake – a very beautiful place!
As a college student, I recall doing a research project surveying migratory ducks in one of the city lakes in the northern part of Mexico. Some visitors to the park were very curious and wanted to know what I was doing – one of these people was a classroom teacher, who asked me if she could bring her class to learn about migratory birds.
I hesitated at first, then I told her that it was okay. First, one school came … then many more. Later, the same students showed concerns about the health of the ducks because they noticed the lake was very polluted, so they organized a cleanup project and planted trees and aquatic plants. Then, city officials started paying attention to the lake – a year later, this lake was the most beautiful, clean lake in this city.
This is the power of Environmental Education (EE), as I experienced it for the first time in my life. That experience showed me that teaching kids about our environment was what I really wanted to do in life, and here I am in Boulder County doing exactly that.
When I came to the states for the first time in 1989, my eyes opened to the many environmental and outdoor education programs and EE materials, ranging from residential EE programs, to summer camps, to after- and in-school programs, to programs for classroom teachers. But I also noticed a lack of representation of Latinos and other minorities in environmental education, science, and other natural resources fields. That motivated me to change the programing at the Cal-Wood Education Center in 1999 when I became the Executive Director.
Now, 40% of the 4K youth we serve annually are minorities, and mainly Latinos. Alongside residential EE programs and summer camps, we also provide summer camps for Latino families, which is essential if we want to impact the whole family. We Latinos also like the outdoors – but, unfortunately, many families don’t know what our beautiful state offers when it comes to outdoor recreation.
One day, I stopped to eat a sandwich in Boulder and the cashier of the restaurant was a mom that I had met at Cal-Wood in one our Latino family camps. She’s a single mom of four kids, and she was glad to see me because she wanted to ask me a favor: she said that one of her twins was interested in going to college to become a biologist, and to do what I do at Cal-Wood. “My son is in high school now, and in two years he hopes to go to college,” she said. “Even though I encourage him to pursue this career, he’s asking questions that I don’t know the answers to … can you talk to him?” I told her that of course, I would be happy to talk to him.
You see, this kid participated in a three-day, two-night science program at Cal-Wood in 5th grade. Then, he participated in our summer camps and in our Teen Adventure Club two years in a row during middle school. As a high school student, he worked as an assistant with our Latino summer camps. And lastly, his mom found a mentor to help him along his way.
To me, the story of this young man reflects the type of work we environmental educators need to strive for, so we can change the demographics of careers in environmental education, outdoor recreation, science, natural resources, and related fields. We need to create more of these pipelines within our programs so students develop interest in the environment, and perhaps eventually pursue a career in this field. To do so, environmental educators, government agencies, school districts, and universities must work together so our programs can be more efficient, positively impacting different stages of life.
As such, the Boulder County Environmental Education Collaborative was formed in 2013 – a working group comprising more than 25 representatives from most informal EE providers that serve youth in Boulder County schools. The goal of the collaborative is to ensure a continuum of environmental education and service learning opportunities for preschool through high school. To this end, our first task was to determine gaps, linkages, and overlaps for existing Boulder County informal environmental education programs. Some key finding include:
- There were 23 organizations providing informal EE to Boulder County schools and three organizations are delivering 80% of total informal EE hours (Eco-Cycle, Thorne Nature Experience [also grantees of the Community Foundation], and Cal-Wood).
- Grade discrepancies: Boulder County preschool, middle school, and high school students were receiving noticeably less informal EE than elementary school students. At the elementary level, 4th and 5th grades were receiving almost as much informal EE as all other grades combined as a result of grade specific programs offered by Cal-Wood and Thorne.
- Socioeconomic and demographic equity: Elementary schools with the highest percentage of students participating in the Free and Reduced Lunch Program (an indicator of poverty) were receiving less informal EE compared to all other elementary students; however, there is no inequality in informal EE delivery to students of color compared to Caucasian students.
- District discrepancy: BVSD students are receiving 68% of the county’s informal EE, and SVVSD students receive only 32% although both school districts are almost the same size.
- Correlation to testing: Students at elementary schools receiving the most informal EE are scoring marginally better on 5th grade TCAP science tests than elementary students at schools receiving the least informal EE.
Since 2014, the EE Collaborative has taken steps to close some of these gaps, including developing the first Environmental Education guidelines; increasing SVVSD programing; and some organizations have changed their targeted schools, while others have increased their programing to schools and grade levels that were lacking EE. Last year, the coalition created the Collaborative Nature Kids/Jóvenes de la Naturaleza Lafayette (NKJN), a collective impact project comprising 30 organizations and local governments focused on providing marginalized communities in Lafayette with quality environmental education and outdoor recreation opportunities. NKJN is an example of programming developed “for the community by the community.”
If we really want to impact our community and make a real change, we must continue to work together to maximize limited resources.
