Empowering young people and their communities by connecting what matters to them with the agency, skills, and knowledge needed to make it happen.
Join us in a community approach to Education for Sustainable Development ("ESD"):
Addressing shared problems of educational practice in an international network.
Enlisting students and community stakeholders in school and community improvement efforts.
Contributing to an open-access database of mentors, models and innovation in school-based community science.
As we embark on 2025, please enjoy highlights from last year:
Finalizing the migration of our free resources to OpenEvo.
Relaunching Global ESD as an implementation partner, to help educators "see one, do one, teach one".
Appointing Josia Razafindramanana as President and Chief Volunteer Officer of the Board, marking a transition from founder to growth mode.
Celebrating our 5th year of internationally piloting our educational design concept.
Launching Portraits of the Park to begin surveying every functional group in the six million acre Adirondack Park (New York, United States).
And more!
Education for Sustainable Development ("ESD") :
Empowers people of all ages with the knowledge, skills, and capacity to make informed decisions and take responsible actions to improve individual, social, economic, and environmental wellbeing. ESD advocates for learning that is:
Cognitive: Improving how we think about and understand positive change efforts.
Socio-emotional: Building social skills, empathy and emotional intelligence.
Behavioral: Encouraging positive actions and behaviors that are win-win-win.
Our Key Strategies:
We work with schools and communities on these aims through three key strategies, supported by open-access classroom materials on a free, Creative Commons license:
Educational Design Labs: supporting interdisciplinary curriculum development through teacher capacity building and conceptual learning.
School-based Community Science Labs: supporting student and whole school community teams in understanding and driving self-selected improvement strategies.
Project Incubation: providing organizational infrastructure and technical support for a diverse range of educational projects that address one or more accelerators to wellbeing (see Adaptive Flexibility compass).
Drawing on insights from biology, economics, anthropology, improvement science and contextual behavioral science, in addition to participatory action research from local schools, we endeavor to identify overarching competencies as well as skills that underpin the work of successful learning communities.
Seeking implementation support? We offer a variety of implementation services to help bring these strategies to life in your classroom, district and/or community.