I grew up in a small rural town in Northern Virginia, surrounded by nature, stewardship, and wonder. The woodlands, creeks, and long drives through farmland shaped my understanding of nature and access. And when I moved to Philadelphia for college, it took me some time trying to figure out where my southern roots fit within both the city and the urban environmental field. Over time, as I progressed throughout my education at Drexel, I began learning about the environment through a wider lens.
When I first arrived at Drexel, I was primarily interested in environmental sustainability by learning how to preserve the nature I so deeply cherish. Over time, experiences in community engagement, public health, environmental education, green workforce development, and Spanish language and culture challenged me to think about environmental issues through a broader lens. I became increasingly interested in how different outside factors shape environmental outcomes and opportunities. These experiences allowed me to witness meaningful education that occurred outside of classrooms and instead through storytelling, stewardship practices, collective labor, relationships to water, and community participation.
In my first internship in Philadelphia, I worked on green workforce development programs for underserved youth through the Philadelphia Energy Authority. During my time there, I saw environmental education become tied to leadership, opportunity, and long-term investment in communities often excluded from sustainability conversations.
The following year, my fieldwork in Zambia through World Vision's Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) department and environmental stewardship initiatives expanded those ideas even further. Conversations about water quickly became conversations about health, education, agriculture, and community resilience. The more time I spent learning alongside students, teachers, and community members, the more interested I became in how environmental education changes when it is rooted in culture, place, memory, and lived experience.
By my senior year, I had become increasingly interested in what makes environmental education create lasting impact. Through my senior thesis on community-based environmental education, I explored how culture, community, youth leadership, and place shape environmental learning and long-term stewardship. Across coursework, workforce development, community engagement, and international fieldwork, I kept encountering examples of powerful environmental education happening outside standard classrooms. As I prepared for future graduate study and research, I became curious about why these approaches seemed so meaningful and what educators might learn from them. This project emerged from those questions and became an opportunity to explore them more deeply.
Through the Climate Pedagogy Incubator, as a part of a research assistantship, I researched BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) focused youth environmental justice organizations across the United States and territories in order to better understand how culturally rooted and place-based approaches are working in part to reshape broader environmental education.
As part of this work, I developed a growing comparative dataset of a multitude of organizations spanning Puerto Rico, Hawaiʻi, Alaska, tribal nations, urban neighborhoods, coastal communities, and rural regions. The database became a way to identify broader patterns, pedagogical approaches, and to visualize shared themes that began to emerge across diverse geographic and cultural contexts.
Check out the database here: BIPOC Youth EJ Program Database
As I continued researching organizations and bringing in academic literature on place-based education, culturally sustaining pedagogy, environmental identity, and environmental justice education, I started noticing how many of the same themes appeared across both the scholarship and the organizations themselves. The work of scholars such as David Greenwood, Megan Bang, Julian Agyeman, Gregory Smith, and Louise Chawla gave me language for patterns I was already seeing emerge in the database.
Across different disciplines and perspectives, these authors emphasize the importance of place, participation, community knowledge, identity formation, and relationships to land and water. Their work reinforced a growing realization that some of the most meaningful environmental learning happens beyond traditional classroom settings and is deeply shaped by culture, community, and lived experience. It also encouraged me to think more deeply about the interconnectedness of these themes and how they continue to emerge across diverse learning environments and community contexts.
What became especially interesting to me was how closely the lived work of the organizations grouped in my dataset was aligned with broader literature themes surrounding belonging, stewardship, resilience, and culturally rooted pedagogy. In many cases, the organizations seemed to be putting these ideas into practice in engaging and creative ways long before I encountered the language to describe them in academic literature. Through community engagement, cultural traditions, stewardship activities, and place-based learning, they offered real-world examples of what these theories can look like in practice.
This also raises important questions for future research. While many studies emphasize the value of place-based and culturally rooted environmental education, there is still much to learn about how these approaches shape long-term environmental stewardship, youth leadership, environmental identity, and community resilience. Future research could explore how these outcomes evolve across different cultural and geographic contexts and what lessons formal educational institutions might learn from community-based models.
Additionally, given the critical role that BIPOC-led youth environmental justice organizations play in fostering environmental engagement, future research should examine strategies for sustaining youth involvement beyond program participation. Better understanding how to minimize participant drop-off and support continued engagement could help strengthen the long-term impact of these programs.
Across the wide range of organizations, environmental education rarely looked like what we might traditionally associate with a classroom model. Rather than relying primarily on teacher-led instruction, standardized curriculum, textbooks, and lectures, many of these programs approached learning as something that happens through experience, participation, and community engagement. Environmental education was taking place in gardens, rivers, coastlines, food systems, restoration projects, outdoor leadership programs, storytelling circles, and community organizing spaces.
Again and again, young people were positioned not simply as students receiving information, but as organizers, growers, educators, paddlers, stewards, and leaders actively contributing to their communities. Through these experiences, they developed environmental knowledge alongside leadership skills, cultural connections, and a sense of responsibility that extended beyond the programs themselves.
As I organized the dataset, several broader approaches to environmental justice education began to emerge, including:
land and food sovereignty programs
water and ocean stewardship initiatives
climate justice organizing spaces
outdoor belonging and healing programs
workforce and leadership development pathways
While each organization operated within its own unique context, many shared a common emphasis on relationship-building, participation, community responsibility, and environmental belonging. Acknowledging that this knowledge does not exist in a vacuum and the interconnectedness and fluidity of these themes was a uniting strength.
One of the strongest themes that emerged throughout this work was the idea of belonging itself. Many organizations were focused on reconnecting youth to land, outdoor spaces, cultural identity, ancestry, stewardship, and community leadership. This focus felt especially significant given the long histories of exclusion, displacement, environmental racism, and underrepresentation that shape many environmental spaces and institutions that trickle down to intergenerational marginalisation. The more time I spent exploring these organizations, the more I began to see climate pedagogy as a practice of relationship-building and participation that works best when acknowledged and grounded in lived experience. These programs are expanding what environmental education can look like and who it can be for youths all over the world.
My hope with this evolving project is that the growing dataset and research synthesis can serve as an accessible resource for educators, students, organizers, and community members interested in culturally rooted climate and environmental justice education. This work highlights the wide ecosystem of community-based pedagogies already taking shape across the United States and territories. Moving forward, I hope to continue creating opportunities for others to contribute organizations, resources, and ideas into this evolving conversation around climate pedagogy, belonging, and environmental justice education.