Understanding Cultural Competency in Experiential Environmental Education Programs

The Barr Foundation has made significant investments in experiential environmental education (E3) programs for youth. The foundation's theory of change is that urban youth who are engaged in experiential learning opportunities from a young age will acquire knowledge deep appreciation for the environment and the skills and self-efficacy to transform themselves into environmental stewards. This transformation from student to steward happens most quickly and most often when E3 programs are designed with a culturally competent foundation and succeed at reaching engaging and drawing on these youth's own cultural diversity.

In the spring of 2005 three Boston environmental education programs who were participating in a Barr Foundation-sponsored Experiential Environmental Learning Cluster decided to deepen their understanding of cultural competency. Antioch New England Institute's Community-based School Environmental project (CO-SEED) Urban Ecology Institute (UEI) and Mass Audubon's Boston Nature Center (BNC) participated in the Cultural Competency Assessment Project. Through this project consultants Judy Tso and Curdina Hill conducted individual cultural competency assessments at each organization. These assessments were aimed at capturing a snapshot of each organization's current progress in cultural competency and creating sets of metrics to measure future progress around objectives of cultural competency. The report contains results from the assessments recommendations for the environmental education field and a section on cultural competency metrics.

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