BGCI Education Blog

We've set up this blog to talk about education, the environment, plants, the universe... oh yes, and botanic gardens. You can join in by leaving comments and signing up for email updates.

Thursday 13 December 2007

Teens for planet earth

Teens for Planet Earth is a programme run by the Wildlife Conservation Society in the US. They run the Bronx Zoo, Prospect Park Zoo and New York Aquarium in New York and have extensive in situ and ex situ conservation programmes. A few years ago it was realised that girls were not taking science as an option at high school. WCS decided to address this through developing 'Girls for Planet Earth'. girls would come to a conference-type, 2 week workshop with WCS staff and learn how to develop, run and manage their own in situ conservation project within their own community.


Girls for Planet Earth has since been expanded into Teens for Planet Earth and has gone global. The website about the programme is focused at the participants, but includes case studies of the kind of work the students have been doing to improve their local environment and conservation in their regions and a series of web pages to lead teenagers through the process to start their own project. Most recently teams in Bangladesh have been getting involved, outlines of their work are also on the TFPE website.

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