Doing it by Heart

All too often service learning is divorced from the bigger picture, it’s becomes just another school requirement necessary to get a passing grade. Students that have never been taught which end of a hammer to hold, are sent off to build a Habitat for Humanity house or to plant trees with no understanding of the ecology of the forest or a local community’s dependency on it.

Our programs strive to build meaningful service components into all of our learning adventures so that student actions meet their skill levels and spring from the heart. We do not approach poor communities as people in need of our help, but rather as educators themselves with a whole new set of skills and knowledge that visiting students can learn from.

Whether planting mangrove trees in deforested areas, conducting base line inventories of endangered species or clearing sea turtle nesting beaches from mountains of trash, our conservation projects are based on real needs that students on our programs come to fully understand.