Last Saturday, our Education Team was honored to join the Environmental Education Alliance Conference of Southwest Florida Conference held at Florida Gulf Coast University’s newest state-of-the-art research and classroom building, the Water School. This conference, organized by the Conservancy’s FGCU Environmental Education Liaison, Dr. Brent Jackson, brings together educators, students, and community members from all over Southwest Florida, fostering collaboration so that we can work together to create the most inclusive, comprehensive programs possible. By doing this, we can reach as many people as possible and spread the message about conserving our region’s most precious resource: the environment!
In the morning, several of our Educators were able to join Dr. Win Everham on an incredible swamp walk deep into a flooded cypress dome, taking the opportunity to explore firsthand the types of sacred habitats that we work so hard to teach people about. These are truly magical wetlands, and it’s a blessing for us to continuously fall in love with the flora and fauna that make this area so special. While that was occurring, our other Educators were able to show off the mobile classroom on our Learning Adventures Bus (LAB). This is one of our greatest resources for community outreach, as it allows us to bring our programs to far more local Floridians across our five-county area than we’d previously been able to reach. For this conference in particular, we were able to demonstrate our program highlighting the Conservancy’s sea turtle research that we rolled out last summer and share how we lead mobile classroom programs with our peers.
Overall, this conference was a massive success, and we thank FGCU for hosting us and Dr. Jackson for coordinating the conference. We were able to showcase how incredible of a resource the LAB is for us in our Education mission, explore the biodiverse wetlands that we get to teach about, and were grateful to meet over 85 other environmental educators who are also passionately working so hard to save Southwest Florida’s natural landscape!