Through the Ebbs and Flows: Growing Student Leadership Through Expanded Participation
In the CEE-Change, Together blog series, NAAEE shares narratives from the CEE-Change Fellows as they implement their community action projects and work to strengthen environmental education and civic engagement capabilities, all supporting the mission of cleaner air, land, and water. Join us on their journey! The Civics and Environmental Education (CEE) Change Fellowship is NAAEE’s initiative to support leadership and innovation in civics and environmental education in North America and beyond.
The 2025 U.S.-based CEE-Change Fellowship Program is supported by generous funding from ee360+, the Cedar Tree Foundation, the Sam and Mary Lawrence Foundation, and the Weeden Foundation. The 2025 International CEE-Change Fellowship Program is a partnership between NAAEE and the Global Environmental Education Partnership (GEEP).
The James River Association (JRA) in Richmond, Virginia, has offered a variety of engaging, hands-on environmental education programming across the James River watershed for over 20 years. Since 2024, I’ve served as the director of education, leading all of our school-based, summer and experiential programs aimed at school age youth, including the newly established James River Expeditions and Future Leaders of Our Waters (FLOW) Fellowship! The goal of my CEE-Change Fellowship Community Action Project (CAP) was to reimagine the pre-existing programs to deepen students’ understanding of the issues related to the James River, and more importantly, empower more youth to make meaningful and lasting changes in their communities. Here’s our journey.
The Making of the James River Leadership Expedition (JRLE)
The program that my CAP focuses on started in 2011 as James River Expeditions, when a group of 12 students and four teachers travelled the 340-mile length of the James in 28 days guided by JRA staff. After that first year, the program opted to break up the trips into three different sectional canoe and camping trips, providing opportunities for students to choose a section instead of committing to a month on the river. Then in 2015, the James River Leadership Academy was born as a separate program for students to plan and implement a capstone project to benefit the James River. This program included a week-long summer session at JRA’s bunkhouse on Presquile National Wildlife Refuge, where students were immersed in leadership and skill development, and three additional sessions in varying locations to work on their plans.
The Upper James expedition is our most advanced trip, and takes students down long stretches starting near the headwaters of the James where they are challenged by Class II and Class III whitewater, as well as remote wilderness camping along the James. Photo credit: James River Association
In 2019, the two programs were combined into one: the James River Leadership Expedition, or JRLE, as we so lovingly refer to it. This “new” program combined the best of both worlds—the downriver canoe and camping trips over summer, an overnight follow up session in November at Presquile, and a classroom session in January—all culminating in a graduation and capstone presentation in May. Students were largely left to their own devices to use what they learned in these sessions to independently plan and implement a project in their communities with little other support.
Examining the Challenges of the JRLE Program
When I started at JRA, almost immediately I heard a lot of uncertainty about the JRLE program. Feedback was coming from many levels of the organization. There was a general consensus that it needed to be revisited and refined. Some really wanted to see it separated back out into two distinct programs. Others felt more intentional time needed to be devoted to make it more impactful and meaningful. And all could agree that the program could do more to reach students from all communities in the area.
As a former teacher who spent much of her classroom time helping students see how they could be change makers in their community and a person who fell in love with the river later in life, I was really passionate about the potential impact these programs could have on youth by introducing to them importance of our river and inspiring them to protect it. So, of course, I jumped right in and started my own discovery work, exploring the past literature, planning materials, and data we had on all of the iterations of these programs. I gathered internal staff feedback through a SOAR analysis and looked for feedback from past participants. I ended up sending out my own survey to alumni about their experiences as well. Through that, we discovered the challenges included a lack of representation of the broader community served, lack of meaningful time with students to delve into the issues that face the programmatic change, and lack of time to support students in creating projects that would have a lasting impact on their communities. So, we set out to learn how we could improve the program and involve our local communities to help with this endeavor.
During my week at the CEE Change Fellowship Leadership Institute, in the Trust Ecology session with Leander Lacy, I learned a lot and was able to reflect on the four types of trust and how my organization had or hadn’t created trust in the communities we were hoping to work with, but also how the larger outdoor industry had historically marginalized some communities from outdoor experiences. I had the opportunity to talk to other Fellows about our program and what we perceived as barriers for participation. Having these perspectives and opportunities to reflect allowed me to hone in on some of the next steps we needed to take. Sitting around the camp fire at night, chatting with other Fellows gave me the opportunity to not only build life long friendships, but to also learn from their experiences working with students, pioneering their own programs, and their own experiences in nature. The culmination of my week there not only left me feeling energized, but inspired for how all of this could come together to help me create a program that was more powerful and impactful.
Every student in our Leadership program develops and implements a community action project with minimal support from our staff. They do the research on issues and pick one that interests them. This student chose to improve habitat for Wood Ducks in the retention ponds in her neighborhood. She built a duck box, presented to others in her community, and installed the duck box at the retention pond. Photo credit: James River Association
In order to re-envision our program to be one that was more welcoming, we wanted community and youth feedback about the current program and some of the changes we were proposing based on our own internal analysis and on the lessons learned at the Leadership Institute. One challenge we’ve encountered has been in finding opportunities to connect with communities and students to get their feedback. We’ve tried to capitalize on relationships we have with schools and teachers, but with tight curriculum pacing in schools and full program schedules for our team, it’s been difficult to visit classrooms and engage with students. We reached out to several Indigenous tribes and organizations to better understand their needs and connected with four people who gave us insights into the barriers and challenges they were facing in supporting their youth. We also connected with the Richmond Public Schools Student Advisory Council and attended one of their meetings, which included student representatives from all of the high schools in Richmond Public Schools (RPS). We shared about the programs as they previously existed, as well as some of the changes we were envisioning, and they provided their feedback, including their excitement and concerns about the programs.
Turning One Program into Two
What we found in these conversations reinforced what we had been thinking: the overnight canoe and camping experiences were a huge barrier to participation for families who did not already have experience in the outdoors or comfort around bodies of water. This reinforced our belief that the best way forward was to split the program back out into two programs, which we are now calling the James River Expeditions and Future Leaders of Our Waters (FLOW) Fellowship!
We took all of this great learning and put our noses to the grindstone to reimagine what the program could be. Thinking more about what we learned at the Leadership Institute, we used the resources from Esther Cowles’ evaluation session and built a logic model for both programs, so we would have a north star in our decision making and way to determine if we were meeting our goals. We reflected on the learning from Dr. Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg about what civic action is and isn’t, and how we can engage our participants in action driven by the students' experiences, perspectives, and ideas. We’ve collaborated with our community partners to build our own Leadership Institute for students where they will have opportunities to hear from experts in the community, and we’ve connected with Earth Force to learn more about their resources and how we can integrate them into our curriculum to help our students lead civic action projects.
One of the biggest challenges has been recruiting more participants, because as an organization, we haven’t yet established relationships with all the communities in our watershed. We acknowledge that more work must be done to continue building these relationships, and our education team has been putting in work to build trust in all four of the realms of the framework that we learned about during the Institute. This work will continue long after the Fellowship is over.
Every student in our Leadership program develops and implements a community action project with minimal support from our staff and then presents their work at our Capstone event. Our evolving FLOW program will provide students with more knowledge and skill building, and students will work in groups to create their action projects with support from near peer mentors, community experts, and JRA staff. These projects will be rooted in the citizen science they will participate in or they will work with JRA advocacy team members to draft and submit bills to the General Assembly of Virginia. Photo credit: James River Association
Where We Are Headed
In our first year of our new dual program, we opened registration on March 1, 2026, and our expeditions are about 85% full and our FLOW program has exceeded our goal of ten students for this first cohort! We spent a lot of time visiting schools in RPS. Our offices and river education centers are squarely in the middle of the city, and annually, we do a lot of programming with RPS students, but every year, we’ve failed to recruit students from RPS to participate in these programs. This year, we made sure to dedicate most of our outreach time to getting the word out in RPS. We visited every high school during lunch to talk to students about the programs and answer questions. We took advice from the Student Advisory Council on how to spread the word as well. And while we haven’t had an overwhelming response from RPS, I think I’m proudest that we have gotten more kids from RPS to sign up than ever before!
After the third straight day of treacherous thunderstorms and squalls on the Middle James expedition, three resilient students enjoyed a rainbow after the storms passed. Photo credit: James River Association
I think we have work to do to continue to build trust and relationships in our RPS communities, but we have started the process, and we are dedicated to continuing to show up and support them in having access to these opportunities to make an impact in their communities. During our year with our first FLOW cohort, we intend to continue to solicit feedback from students about what they need, what’s working and what isn’t, and make them active participants in building something that will become a space where students feel welcome, heard, and empowered to fight for the James River and their communities.