Projects

The National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Learning Initiative began work towards developing national guidelines for play and learning areas in 2009. As outlined in the NWF's policy action plan, Connecting Kids with Nature, children are faced with many options for staying indoors and few options for getting outside, connecting with nature, and acquiring the life skills only available through interacting with nature. The U.S. Forest Service, with matching efforts from sites developing nature play areas will provide funding for the guidelines over the next two years. This project will create policy and practice guidelines for natural play areas in childhood and family institutions: childcare centers, municipal parks, public schools, and federal lands. Research based design concepts that bring children and families together with their natural environments, in a variety of settings.  The project will promote guideline adoption by stakeholder professional associations, governments, and regulatory bodies.

Secretary of the Interior Salazar has launched a bold initiative, the 21st Century Youth Conservation Corps, to provide youth with a direct experience of nature and introduce them to careers in conservation.  First hand accounts of intern activities are available on this blog.

The goal of the project is to facilitate the implementation and use of naturalized outdoor learning environments in North Carolina childcare centers by creating a specialized professional network covering all North Carolina Division of Child Development (DCD) Licensing Consultants and Environmental Rating Assessors. 

The Pathways for Play: Best Practice Guidelines, Infusing play into pathway networks to encourage active lifestyles for children, families, and communities publication was sponsored by PlayCore and brought together many staff and board members from American Trails, as well as other trail and pathway experts, in an advisory capacity.

Located on the border of Chapel Hill and Durham, the Montessori Community School (MCS) campus is home to 230 students, ages 18 months to 14 years. The campus includes twelve classrooms, a gym, art and music center, outdoor learning centers, a field, and existing wooded area. “MCS is a learning community of children, parents, faculty, and staff, each with distinct roles and responsibilities. Adults work in concert to support children’s development as active, peaceful, life-long learners and global citizens.” The school emphasises outdoor learning. The Natural Learning Initiative (NLI) worked with the Montessori Community School and the Montessori Community Association (MCA, parent-led organization) to create naturalized play and learning settings for the primary school area and the Spark Center (arts and music center) serving the elementary school.

The Natural Learning Initiative (NLI) worked with the Montessori School of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to create a Design Program and Schematic Master Plan for the development of the school grounds. The mission of the Montessori School of Winston-Salem is "to provide a nurturing and secure environment to promote the development of each child physically, emotionally, socially, as well as academically." The community design process embraced a series of workshops with teachers, children, parents, and administrators.  Workshop participants brainstormed programming needs, and suggested physical settings necessary to support them. The Design Program and Master Plan for the school grounds offer the vision of a restored natural environment for playing and learning, including sensory plantings,  habitat, and woodland restoration.

The Natural Learning Initiative (NLI) worked with the Children’s Montessori School of Jacksonville, NC, on Project Greenspace, a comprehensive Design Program and Master Plan. The community design process for the project included a series of workshops with children, director and directresses, parents, administrators, the Board of Trustees, and community stakeholders.

The First Baptist Kindergarten, a private preschool founded in 1952. The program serves 225 children ages two through five. NLI was appointed to help the First Baptist Kindergarten improve the outdoor environment as a complement to the well-established, progressive early childhood program already developed by the teaching staff.

The Elizabeth Ann Clune Montessori School of Ithaca, New York consulted the Natural Learning Initiative to create a comprehensive design program and master plan for the school grounds, with the mission "to nurture the hearts, minds, and spirits of children and adults in the Ithaca community through stewardship of the land."

A goal of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic by 2015. When appropriately designed and managed, neighborhood sidewalks and streets, and local parks and playgrounds are children’s most popular neighborhood play places. When designed as meaningful desinations, parks should motivate children to walk/bike/skate to make frequent trips (getting to parks as well as being in parks) to help satisfy the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommended 60 minutes a day of moderate or vigorous physical activity. Safe routes to and from parks, which depend on neighborhood form and context, are as important as the physical attributes of parks themselves. NLI collaborated with NC State University colleagues to implement the interdisciplinary I-PARK research project, which employed a two-nested ecological systems perspective to integrate social-environmental (neighborhood characteristics and park characteristics) and individual characteristics.

Over 8 million children in the U.S., including almost one million Head Start and Early Head Start children, receive childcare away from their families for 35 hours a week or more. This includes three out of every four children four years of age or younger as well as four out of five five-year-olds. As children enrolled in Head Start and Early Head Start live in low resource communities, it is even more important than for other children that the places where they spend the majority of their waking hours are high quality environments. This is especially important for those children living in apartments without access to safe outdoor environments.

Wellesley College Child Study Center (WCSC) is a laboratory preschool for the Wellesley College Psychology Department, located in Wellesley, MA. Built in 1913 and originally named to honor a prominent 19th century early childhood educator (Anne L. Page), the center was one of the first laboratory schools in the United States. When the center was required to upgrade their outdoor environment to meet new State of Massachusetts early childhood safety regulations, NLI was contacted for assistance. The redesigned outdoor environment (the new Children's Garden) was also required to meet the Federal and State of Massachusetts accessibility standards. NLI collaborated with campus landscape architect, Michael Van Valkenburgh and Associates (MVVA), to meet these stringent requirements on the steeply sloping site, which was subdivided into areas for three age groups (younger, middle, and older).

Heritage Park is a public housing community administered by the Raleigh Housing Authority. Communities in Schools North Carolina (CISNC), the leading dropout prevention organization in the country, established an after-school tutoring program based at the Heritage Park Community Center and wanted to create an outdoor learning area with easy access from the building. In 2002, the Junior League of Raleigh committed to assist and appointed NLI as a partner to facilitate the community planning process and to develop a schematic design.

Kids Together Playground (KTP) is a universally designed family recreation facility, containing many uncommon settings and features, located in Marla Dorell Park, Cary, North Carolina. Design of the park started in 1994 with a community workshop involving children and adults in the design process.

Even though, a conservative estimate of the number of parks and playgrounds in the US is almost 110 thousand, representing a continuing investemnt of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, almost no attempt has been made to evaluate their level of success, how much they are used, and to what extent they respond to user needs. The Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) of Kids Together Playground, Cary, NC, was conducted as an initial step towards remedying the lack of research evidence that could be useful for urban recreation and park planners, designers, and policy makers. 

Blanchie Carter Discovery Park is a four acre outdoor play and learning environment (OPALE) located at Southern Pines Primary School in Southern Pines, North Carolina. In 1995, a group of parents decided that their children deserved more than a hot, dusty, barren, unsafe playground and initiated a process of transforming the area into an outdoor classroom where children could learn through play and investigation of living environments. Over $150,000.00 was raised through donations from the community, businesses, civic organizations, and foundations. The park was designed by Robin Moore, future NLI director, to serve the serve the dual roles of park for the surrounding community and model educational resource for the school. One of many visitor highlights was Susan Humphries from the Coombes Primary School, UK, who within two minutes captured the rapt attention of the children as she gave a lesson on air.