About
Our Education Programs seek to carry the original message of Earth Day into the 21st century learning environment. The first Earth Day back on April 22, 1970 was billed as “the first national teach-in on the environment” and our Education Team works to continue this tradition by creating programs and policies for students, teachers and our network of over 30,000 educators interested in environmental issues. Annually, our collected efforts provide critical leadership in the fields of environmental education and green schools, while also saving communities millions of dollars and millions of pounds of pollution. We specifically emphasize the importance of environmental education, green schools and key public policy solutions to help create an environmentally literate and informed citizenry.
As the backbone of our program, environmental education represents a decades old tradition of developing environmental learning opportunities for students of all ages and backgrounds. Our efforts stress not only the importance of getting kids outside and exercising more, but the emergence of critical ideas about “well-rounded education” in America. Today, environmental education seeks to give students, teachers and communities alike the skills and knowledge necessary to thrive in the 21st century world. While we continue to promote innovative environmental education programming with such national partners as the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF) and PBS, we also understand the importance of transforming our nation’s educational facilities into sustainable, healthy schools. For these reasons, we established a partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council and The Clinton Foundation in 2007 to “green America’s schools within this generation.”
Now is the time to transform the most neglected and overlooked teaching tool in existence – the school building – and turn it into a center for community innovation, health and learning that benefits everyone. Green, or healthy, schools have the potential to not only significantly improve the environmental footprint of facilities around the world, but drastically reduce economic costs and improve students’ overall learning environment. We believe that every child in America deserves to go to a healthy school, and our programs strive to directly create these opportunities – by installing solar panel systems, constructing school gardens or swapping inefficient energy products – to deliver cleaner, healthier and more sustainable learning environments for our nation’s schools.
But we realize that change like this doesn’t happen overnight. Teachers, students and schools themselves embody an ethos of community building nationwide. And that’s why we are here to help! Our programs work to educate members of the public and raise general awareness on the incredible viability of environmental education and green schools. As a result, we help create public awareness and education campaigns to advance the green schools and environmental education movements nationwide. For example, we are founding members of the nationally acclaimed No Child Left Inside Coalition and work closely with partners like the Campaign for Environmental Literacy to assert leadership in growing health and sustainable schools across our country.
Have questions? Want to learn more? Interested in partnering with us? We welcome your help and feedback! Feel free to contact us directly at education@earthday.org or call +1-202-518-0044 to learn more.
