Environmental Education for the Next Generation (EENG)

The Problem

Deep cuts to public education budgets across the country are drastically affecting how our nation’s youth develop and grow. In the past few years, public school students of all ages have lost beneficial programs and services that once added depth and dimension to formal classroom education. As these services are eliminated, more and more students are tuning out in the early stages of their educational development, resulting in an inequality of opportunity that’s counter to the very fabric on which this country was built. This issue is especially prominent in California, where yet another round of budget reductions announced in December of 2011 will require an additional $328 million cut to K-12 educational services. This puts further strain on a public education system that already ranks dead last in the country in terms of average class size and the ratio of teachers to students, according to the National Education Association’s most recent report. Without the freedom to hire new teachers and staff to cope with growing enrollment, these problems will only get worse and more kids will disengage—unless we do something. Compounding the issue of extreme budgetary pressure on the school system are the pending global environmental crises of our day: climate change, resource scarcity, land degradation, and water pollution, among many others. Our future is in peril. It’s vital that we educate and empower the next generation of leaders, and provide them with the knowledge and tools necessary to view their everyday choices through a lens of sustainability. I founded Environmental Education for the Next Generation (EENG) to do just that. Our mission is to bring supplementary youth-to-youth environmental education programs to the public school system completely free of charge, building more sustainable communities from the youngest members of society up.

Plan of Action

As a result of the enthusiasm and meaning our volunteer instructors bring to the classroom each and every week, Environmental Education for the Next Generation (EENG) has become hugely popular among teachers, college students, and—most importantly—the students we teach. In just two and a half years of operation, we’ve expanded the program from a single 2nd grade classroom in 2009 to teaching more than 2,300 students in 95 classrooms this year alone. As Executive Director, I’ve overseen the launch of four regional chapters in California; EENG now runs in Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco. Since the successful launch of our regional chapters, which my team of directors and I have overseen from our headquarters in Santa Barbara, we truly believe that the sky is the limit. We’ve proven that the model works in a wide variety of communities, so we can’t wait to get more college and elementary school students involved! We recently launched a major publicity campaign to tell our story as widely as possible, and hope to leverage the connections and attention we garner to continue to accelerate our regional expansion. My ultimate dream is to bring the program nationwide, and feel that based on the reception we’ve received so far, this goal is completely within reach. It’s vital that we continue to offer our program completely free of charge, so as not to further the financial burden on the public school system. Since there are costs associated with program development and launch, we’ll need the support of organizations like Do Something to take our program to the next level!