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Martin LeBlanc
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Friday, August 24, 2007
The Next Steps?
Seattle, WA
As I stare out my window on a beautiful Pacific Northwest day I am trying to see where the 'Leave No Child Inside Movement' as I like to call it is heading. So much progress has been made this year as groups such as the Sierra Club and others including the National Military Family Association www.nmfa.org , and the Children and Nature Network www.cnaturenet.org have established themselves as leaders to connect children with the outdoors. There is no doubt that in a year this issue has turned into a movement as local movements in Cincinnati http://www.lncigc.org/, state movements in New Mexico and New Hampshire have picked up on the importance of working together to make sure every child recieves an outdoor experience. But how do we turn all of this talk into action?
I see two fundemental tenets of how we must work together to connect children with the outdoors.
- There is no need to reinvent the wheel, there are thousands of great programs nationwide connecting children with the outdoors. These programs are diverse as can be seen by two programs the Sierra Club supports, Islandwood School on Bainbridge Island, WA www.islandwood.org which gives children a week long intensive environmental education experience to the Rocky Mountain Youth Corps in Taos, New Mexico which provides young people with outoor service learning experiences http://youthcorps.org/. What do these programs have in common beisdes working with local communities to get kids outdoors? The need for sustainable funding. This is why we have to work with legislators on both the local, state and federal level to get sustainable funding for outdoor programs.
- The second piece I see as critical is making sure we tie in outdoor education experiences to educational standards. There is no doubt in my mind that we are moving towards standards based education nationwide and in order for teachers to have the ability to take children on field trips there must be outdoor education included in standards based education. This is why the Sierra Club is supporting the Federal Leave No Child Inside Act https://online.nwf.org/site/Advocacy?JServSessionIdr005=i6kuxub0o3.app6b&cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=327 which will help make this a reality.
There is a lot of talk on the table but I hope to see some more action as we head in to 2008! Sierra Magazine has a great profile of our Youth Volunteer Coordinator Juan Martinez in its new issue http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200709/profile.asp
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