Ten Strands’ outdoor learning initiatives intend to make safe and healthy outdoor learning spaces widely available to TK–12 students as a positive, accessible, hopeful, and powerful resource.
Campaign for Outdoor Learning
Our new statewide Campaign for Outdoor Learning aims to support student access to green schoolyards, walking field trips to nearby parks and open spaces, field trips that require transportation, and weeklong overnight outdoor science schools.
Decades of research show that spending time outdoors has myriad benefits, especially for children. In September 2024, leaders from various fields and disciplines convened to form a coalition that unites educators, policymakers, researchers, and advocates to reimagine learning environments and address climate and environmental challenges. By fostering collaboration and challenging traditional ideas of where education happens, this effort is paving the way for a healthier, more inspiring future for all California’s students.
School Garden Coalition
Ten Strands helped launch the School Garden Coalition, supporting school gardens of all types—edible, native habitat, and pollinator—and recognizes gardens as important to students’ equitable access to environmental literacy and outdoor education.
We advocate for every California public school to have the resources, including long-term funding, to provide on-school site garden-based instruction as an equitable and cost-effective way to instill environmental literacy across all grade levels. The coalition is sponsoring the Senate Bill 341 advocacy campaign to take a critical first step in restarting and expanding California’s unused, unfunded Instructional School Garden Program (ISGP) to include instruction and maintenance.
California Schoolyard Forest System℠
Building on the National Outdoor Library and our partnership with Green Schoolyards America, we are also a founding partner of the California Schoolyard Forest System℠.
This initiative launched in 2022 to create PK–12 public school grounds statewide that directly shade and protect students from extreme heat and rising temperatures due to climate change. Visit the Resource Library for practical resources to support schools and school districts as they grow schoolyard forests, including a framework that identifies how to use them to support academics across grades and subjects.
