We believe in empowering students to be environmentally literate, engaged citizens who can act for the well-being of their family, broader community, and environment. Our focus is to support teachers with age-appropriate instructional materials on local environmental challenges, sparking students’ curiosity about how their community is affected and possible solutions. This year, the CCEJP writing teams — made up of community- and student-centered organizations with diverse experiences writing curriculum and providing professional learning — have made significant progress toward developing the curricular units. Lesson plans continue to be drafted under the guidance of Ten Strands, BSCS Science Learning, and the Climate Collective. Read more about the curricular resources here.

ADVOCACY:
SUPPORTING TEACHERS WITH PROFESSIONAL LEARNING!

As part of our work on CCEJP, we supported Senator Ben Allen’s budget request for the state to allocate an additional $10 million to provide sufficient professional learning support for teachers, and build upon and leverage the initial investment in curricular resource development. Through this campaign, we built a broad coalition of 250 supporters, positioning us for a successful campaign next year.

Read our responses to the California State Budget process this year:

• Final State Budget
• May Revise

California Environmental Literacy Initiative (CAELI)

A collective action network seeking to ensure access to high-quality environment-based learning for all California’s TK–12 students.

We believe in the power of systems change as a lever to ensure that all students have access to high-quality environment-based learning. This year — with a membership made up of educators, governmental and non-governmental agencies, scientists, sustainability professionals, and individuals with expertise on the environment and systems change — CAELI completed its first full season under the leadership of Andra Yeghoian as project director and the new Theory of Action. Andra replaced Ten Strands’ CEO, Karen Cowe, who was in this role for the first eight years of the initiative. Learn more about how the hubs promote student learning in our monthly newsletters.

 Joining Juanita Chan-Roden, we also welcomed CAELI’s newest co-chair, executive director of the Association for Environmental and Outdoor Education Estrella Risinger, and said goodbye to departing co-chair Craig Strang, since the launch of CAELI. We thank Karen and Craig for their service. Read more about the leadership transition that took place in June 2023 here.

Communications

At CAELI, we have new and exciting opportunities for individuals and organizations to be a part of the movement! This year we published two new web pages: one provides ways to Get Involved, and the other offers access to the many Resources created by CAELI.

Environmental and Climate Change Literacy Projects (ECCLPs):

A collaborative effort between Ten Strands and the UC and CSU schools of education to educate the more than 400,000+ graduating high school students per year in California to become literate in climate change and environmental justice issues and solutions.

Many of California’s 5.8 million public school students enter adulthood with inadequate climate and environmental justice literacy. Ten Strands partners with ECCLPs to build pre-service and in-service educator capacity to activate and empower students to be literate in climate and environmental justice issues. Last fall, approximately 400 climate activists gathered at UC Irvine to relaunch ECCLPs and recommit to the fight for environmental literacy in PK–12 education systems across California. Read about the event here.

Partnerships:

In the spring of 2023, ECCLPs launched its first campus hub at California State University, Dominguez Hills, as well as three working committees focused on Research, PK–12 Teaching and Learning, and Community-Based Partnerships.

Communications:

ECCLPs inaugural executive director Kelley Lê shared her insights on the work advanced in the last year, featuring the voices of each ECCLPs committee lead. Learn about each of the committees and their leads here.

Outdoor Learning Initiatives:

Creating safe and healthy outdoor learning spaces at school sites, strategies for teaching and learning outdoors, and opportunities for field based residential and day-time outdoor learning.

Schoolyard forests shade and protect TK–12 students from extreme heat and rising temperatures due to climate change. The California Schoolyard Forest System℠ — our partnership with Green Schoolyards America — launched a free online resource library providing practical resources to schools and districts as they plan, develop, use, and manage schoolyard forests.

Sustainable and Climate-Ready Schools Initiative:

A partnership with UndauntedK12 to ensure school infrastructure and grounds are resilient and support student health, safety, learning, play, and development in a time of rapidly increasing extreme weather.

In this era of rapid climate change, we need to ensure that the buildings and grounds of California’s public schools are developed as sites of resilience and sustainability. In 2022, we partnered with UndauntedK12 to launch the California Climate Ready Schools Coalition, a group of thirty diverse groups representing various perspectives on education and climate policy collaborating to support climate-ready schools for California’s most vulnerable students.

In the spring of 2023, the Climate Ready Schools Coalition released Climate Resilient California Schools: A Call to Action, the first comprehensive report on climate-driven impacts on children in California. The report presents evidence-based recommendations, including a master plan for California’s schools that centers climate resilience within the 21st-century mission of public schools, securing students’ health, safety, and learning through extreme weather events, environmental hazards, and other disruptions.

Data Initiative for Environmental and Climate Action in California’s TK–12 Schools:

A partnership with UndauntedK12 to provide an interactive data sets that can be used to catalyze change for environmental and climate literacy and action efforts in California TK–12 schools.

This Data Initiative responds to the need for an equity-informed, data-driven approach that prioritizes underserved communities and addresses environmental injustices. This year, the Data Initiative (currently in beta) has made significant progress in advancing a statewide analysis of:

• school districts in counties taking the most and least amount of environmental and climate action;
• the California Green Ribbon program since 2014; and
• the extent to which the twenty-five largest school districts in California have invested in environmental and climate action.

Advocacy:

The Data Initiative identifies key demographic indicators related to need, as well as tracks readiness and progress on high impact leverage points for change such as school board policies, bond measures, and investments in environmental and climate initiatives and staff to lead these initiatives.

Communications:

The Data Initiative launched a website that includes the start of the interactive data sets that can support scaling implementation of environmental and climate action in California’s schools by using an equity-informed and data-driven approach.