A group of teens sits around a campfire during Vida Verde’s Summer Leadership Project. Vida Verde Nature Education
“We put the goats on a leash, and we walk them on the trail, and we have the goats eat the poison oak!” says Devin Peyton, Teen and Family Programs Director at Vida Verde Nature Education. Vida Verde is a nonprofit environmental education organization located in San Gregorio—about 15 miles south of Half Moon Bay—that helps students build connections to one another and to the environment in many ways—including taking goats for a hike. Students coax the goats through a shallow creek, shoes off and pants rolled up to their knees, and get pulled by the goats as they make their way along a trail canopied by branches of oaks, bay laurels, and redwoods.
Not only is hiking with goats an exciting new experience for students, but it also teaches them about the natural landscape around them. While hiking, the goats munch on poison oak growing along the edges of the trail. Later, when students hike the same trail without the goats, they know what poison oak looks like and how to avoid it.
At Vida Verde, says Devin, teaching environmental science happens through teaching students “how to be a good human being to each other, and to the planet...and how to connect to the earth.” For the students Vida Verde serves, who come from backgrounds that are traditionally underrepresented in outdoor spaces, the days they spend at Vida Verde can be a powerful time of connection and community that can leave a lasting mark.
Students harvest lettuce from the Vida Verde organic farm. Vida Verde Nature Education
Promoting Equity in the Outdoors
Vida Verde’s mission is to “promote educational equity by providing free, overnight environmental learning experiences for students who don’t otherwise get the opportunity.” While the Bay Area has a number of overnight, outdoor environmental education programs, they can be expensive, requiring schools or families to pay for students to attend. This means that students from low income families, or those attending underfunded schools, may not have the opportunity to experience these programs. Founded in 2001 by two former classroom teachers who saw a need for more outside-the-classroom educational experiences for low income students, Vida Verde works to close this equity gap by providing their programs for free and specifically designed for the populations they serve. They host students from schools throughout the Bay Area, over 99% of whom are students of color and over 85% of whom qualify for free or reduced lunch, in two main programs.
The first, which has been running for over twenty years, brings classes of fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students to Vida Verde during the school year for three nights. The second, called the Summer Leadership Project (SLP), started in 2020 and gives high school students a chance to return to Vida Verde for a week during the summer. When Devin first started at Vida Verde, he worked with the school year program. Now, he leads SLP, as well as working to connect with teens and families throughout the year.
When students come for the school year program, Devin says, Vida Verde “blows their minds with themselves, with our farm, with the redwoods, the coast.” They hike through the redwoods, explore tide pools, milk goats, go for a night hike, and pick fresh vegetables from Vida Verde’s farm. These experiences are new for many of these younger students, and Devin says he loved seeing them “do things they never thought they could do, like taking their shoes off and walking through a creek.”
These types of formative experiences in nature can spark lasting connections between students and the environment, deepening students’ attachment to place. “Place-based education”— including programs like Vida Verde’s — “works really well for a number of reasons. One, no matter who you are, you have a place,” explains Dr. Alison Bowers, a research associate in Stanford University’s Social Ecology Lab, a group that investigates environmental learning and behavior and the connections between people and the environment. “When people feel connected to their place, they’re more likely to engage in place-protective behaviors. Environmental education...really taps into the power of place.”
Students wade through a creek during a hike at Vida Verde. Vida Verde Nature Education
“Everyone has a right to nature”
A core part of Vida Verde’s work is “demystifying natural spaces,” Devin says, “and showing that...going on a hike isn’t just a white person’s activity. Going on a hike is an all people activity.”
The inequities that Vida Verde’s programs seek to address are present in the outdoors more broadly. Tied to histories of violence and exclusion from outdoor spaces, nature can seem like an overwhelmingly white place. As of 2020, only 23% of visitors to national parks were people of color, with the other 77% being white. Due to forces of systemic racism, including housing practices such as redlining, people of color are also much more likely to live in places that are nature deprived—lacking in green spaces such as parks and trails—with 74% of nonwhite people in the United States living in nature deprived areas. Similar trends are present for low income communities, 70% of which experience nature deprivation.
But the benefits of nature, both for adults and young people, stretch across lines of race and class. Looking at environmental education specifically, students who participate in such experiences may see a wide range of positive outcomes, including improved social skills, critical thinking, and test scores, higher levels of curiosity and creativity, and an increase in environmental knowledge and pro-environmental behaviors.
Dr. Bowers says that the goals of environmental education often center around increasing people’s environmental knowledge, while also spurring them to take action. Her research, which focuses largely on environmental literacy and learning, has shown that “environmental education can create a sense of community, can increase collective resources, collective imagination, collective knowledge, which leads then to collective action for the environment.”
Devin has seen this sense of community and collective care for the environment being built in Vida Verde students. “Everyone has a right to nature” he says. Once students know that, and feel that they belong in nature, “it’s a lot easier for them, when they get older...and they have more agency over their lives...to start making decisions—probably—that protect the environment, protect themselves, protect their communities.”
SLP students cook a meal together at Vida Verde. Vida Verde Nature Education
Providing continuity for teens
Dr. Bowers says that she hopes environmental education can be part of building “stronger people and stronger communities.” In his work with the teens participating in Vida Verde’s Summer Leadership Project (SLP), Devin experiences this happening firsthand.
Unlike some outdoor environmental education programs, which are one-time experiences without a clear path for continuing engagement, SLP provides continuity for students who choose to participate. SLP teens who came to Vida Verde when they were younger are excited to return, and coming back can be a powerful experience. “The magic they felt” at Vida Verde, says Devin, “the community they felt, it becomes a possibility for their lives” rather than just “a magical place that exists in [their] imagination.”
Like it does in the school year program, the natural setting of Vida Verde plays an important role in SLP for multiple reasons. For one, it makes it easier for students to connect. “There is something magical that happens when you take [teens] away from their best friends in the school setting they know or in their community setting they know, and then you put them...without phones in this small natural space, and you provide programming,” says Devin. In a new setting, without the distractions that are often present, students come to “understand each other like family.” Sometimes, community building happens through activities as simple as cooking and washing dishes together.
SLP is also a time when students are able to play, laugh, and relax. This matters, Devin says, because teens aren’t often given a chance to just play. When they go to the beach, Devin shows the teens that they “can just lay down on the ice plant—all these prickly looking plants that are all along the coast...and we just lay on the ice plant and throw it at each other. It’s like a devolving a little bit into younger kids. We’re just lounging.” When Devin sees students again after SLP, he says some will tell him that it was “the best week of their life,” in part because of the chance it gave them to relax.
SLP students milk a goat at Vida Verde’s farm. Vida Verde Nature Education
Vida Verde is also a place for teens to be challenged and supported as they try new things. Along with walking goats, students also help milk them every morning. Devin says that one of his favorite parts of working at Vida Verde is watching students go from “squirming” before milking a goat, unsure if they can do it, to “laughing hysterically” once they do. They work together to build campfires every night, and as they grow to know and trust each other throughout the week, the campfires become a place where they can share honestly with one another. Students come in with different levels of comfort with the activities at Vida Verde, Devin says, but “they can succeed. Everything we do here, everyone can do if they choose to.”
The students participating in SLP are given more agency throughout their time at Vida Verde, and that can build a sense of ownership over the outdoor space they’re in—a particularly powerful feeling for teens from backgrounds that have been traditionally excluded from the outdoors. “Vida Verde provides a place for these students...to have ownership over a natural space, so that they know they belong at this place, in nature, at the redwood forest. They’re much more likely to go on a walk” with their family at a place close to home “if they’ve been to this program.”
One of Devin’s favorite moments of SLP comes at the very end of the week. Before giving students back their phones, he reminds them that they don’t need phones to feel the sense of community and connection they experienced during their time at Vida Verde. He says there are often tears, and lots of hugs, as students prepare to leave. “That moment is so validating, because I’m like, ‘Okay, we’ve done something good here’.”
SLP participants explore the tidepools. Vida Verde Nature Education
“Everyone belongs”
For some Vida Verde participants, their connection to the program even extends beyond their high school years. Devin stays in touch with many of the teens he’s come to know through SLP, sending them texts on their birthdays and inviting them to barbecues at Vida Verde. In a response to a recent birthday text he sent to a former SLP participant, now in college, the girl said, “Vida Verde is my family.” Another student returned last summer as an SLP counselor, after having come as a fifth grader and participated in SLP every summer he could in high school.
By providing outdoor environmental education opportunities to this population of students—and staying connected with them after they leave—Vida Verde breaks down barriers, builds community, and leaves a lasting impression on many participants. “They treat themselves better, they treat their peers better, they treat the environment better than if they hadn’t gone through an outdoor environmental program,” Devin says. “I think that is some of the greatest good we can do, is just show that everyone belongs and has a natural space that they can go to.”
A group of students walks together on the beach during their Vida Verde program. Vida Verde Nature Education
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Erin Cole is a master’s student in the Environmental Communication program at Stanford and completed her bachelor’s degree in Earth Systems at Stanford last June. She is passionate about environmental education and marine science and hopes to work at the intersection of these fields after graduation. In her free time, she enjoys tidepooling, hiking, reading, and making crafts.
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