We are excited to announce the launch of Grow Outside: A Social and Emotional Learning Toolkit for Residential Environmental Learning Centers. This website is the result of a year-long partnership of residential environmental learning centers, convened by NatureBridge to develop common language and tools for our field. The resources included in the toolkit are designed to prompt individual and group reflection within your site, and possibly even lead toward program refinement or organizational improvement. You can access Grow Outside here!

As we entered the final stages of preparing this toolkit to share, Coronavirus overtook our lives and typical ways of being. We are losing our livelihoods, fearing for our loved ones, and anticipate suspended futures. COVID-19 has stripped away the layers of artifice and barriers between us, leading us to remember what is most important: how the connections we have and will build with each other and other species, will nurture and sustain us.
The need for the skills strengthened by social and emotional learning (SEL) – empathy, respect for difference, communication skills – has been even more pronounced these past days as we witness the reckoning of another pandemic, racism and white supremacy. While these materials cannot undo centuries of oppression, we do hope that they will help our educational community to continue to grow, to strive to do better. That work takes all of us. 

Estrella Risinger,

On behalf of the NatureBridge team and the REEP collective