Grant Funds Forward Social & Emotional Learning at NatureBridge

Students spend their days working in small learning groups with a skilled environmental science educator. Through reflection, team building activities, and group challenges, students develop stronger social awareness and learn more about themselves. Our educators make learning challenging, engaging, and meaningful. NatureBridge’s curriculum also incorporates multicultural perspectives on humans’ relationship with the natural world that are meaningful to students of diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds.

We are honored to have been recently selected as a grantee amongst leading youth development organizations considered by the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation to be a part of its Character Development Initiative. Roughly 48% of our nation’s youth will come into contact with one of these organizations over the course their K-12 career; together, we have tremendous potential to influence and support their development. At NatureBridge, grant funds will catalyze our focus on social and emotional learning, building on our existing strengths to develop organization-wide systems for staff training, support, and accountability. We seek to identify preferred outcomes for social and emotional learning (SEL) in overnight, informal educational settings, ultimately leading to greater program impact across the field of environmental education.

This fall, educators on our campuses participated in trainings focused on SEL in an effort to establish common language and explore the alignment between SEL research and environmental education. The training was grounded in CASEL’s Core Competencies (self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making). Educators worked together to identify practices that they currently use that support social and emotional growth in their students. This work will help us to increase the confidence and competence of our educators in incorporating SEL into NatureBridge programming.