I want to challenge myself!
I love Nature!
Girls where I live don’t get the chance to do things like this.
I am soooooooo lucky to have this opportunity!
On May, 4th 2010, Jessica Snyder and I were in a small room of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. The labyrinthine halls of the academy’s basement, complete with noggin-skimming water pipes barely above head, is home to WINS (Women in Natural Science).
WINS is an innovative and successful science enrichment program conducted by the Academy of Natural Sciences in collaboration with the School District of Philadelphia. Since its founding in 1982, WINS has been providing female public school students with hands-on science classes, scientific literacy and skill-building activities, and opportunities for personal growth in a uniquely nurturing setting. To date, more than 600 young women have been exposed to the fascinating world of experiential science through the WINS program—a reflection of the positive contribution the Academy is making to young female students in Philadelphia, as well as to the natural environments in which they live.
It was a warm, beautiful, late afternoon day in Philly and we were meeting, for the first time, some of the participants in our ABI / WOW (Americas Best Idea/Women on the Water) river trip program. This is the second NPF (National Park Foundation) funded-program PEEC has been awarded this past year.
Inspired by the film “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” the National Park Foundation has established the “America’s Best Idea Grants” program to connect underserved audiences to the national parks through digital storytelling and stewardship. The first phase of the program was completed in early fall 2009, and helped build new connections between 35 national parks and their surrounding communities.
PEEC’s winning program, Women on the Water, is a multi-disciplinary, experiential education program focused on building excitement and engagement in young women for the natural world and the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. The program's objective is to provide 12 female high school juniors and seniors from urban Philadelphia the opportunity to learn about the Delaware River and its associated riparian ecosystems. While learning about the river and themselves, they will experience the importance of the river to the recreation area through which it flows. The young women will have many opportunities to learn about environmental education while paddling and sleeping on the river, learning about the Park and, for a select few, by interning at the Pocono Environmental Education Center.
There are many components to this program and all lead to the expected outcome of helping young women get excited about careers in the natural world and in National Parks.
A trip to PEEC has been a part of the WINS program for many years. This special opportunity for a select few of the WINS girls to raft, canoe, and kayak the river offers them the chance to deepen their experience in the Poconos by allowing them the ability to interact with the Park and the natural world on a level deeper than they would have experienced had they only ever been to PEEC once.
The WOW program starts in June with an overnight trip to PEEC to prep and planning the river trip. During this trip, the girls will learn about basic camping and paddling, how to prep for an extended outdoor trip and how to record observations about their experiences. Also included in this trip will be content about watersheds, river systems, riparian ecosystems, estuaries and headwaters. Through this initial planning trip we expect the girls to become a tighter-knit community of learners, friends and stewards of nature and national lands.
The month of July will see the girls heading to the river. They will spend the first day and night preparing to embark on the river. The second day and night they will be rafting the Upper Delaware River while blogging about their trip (this will be a constant in the program as blog posts will be sent via PDA while on the river). Day three will be spent canoeing down the central part of the river and day four will consist of kayaking just south of PEEC. Each day will end with camping on the shore and debriefing about the day and the trip as a whole. On day six, the young women and their instructors will travel back to PEEC to break down their gear, debrief the trip, and work on their personal projects. They will spend this night at PEEC in the yurt village, sleeping in real beds.
The third and final phase of this program will be the return of 4 of the participants to PEEC for a 2-week residential environmental education internship at PEEC.
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