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Aubrae (she/her) serves as the director of the Woodland Pond School in Bangor, Maine. She brings a lot of business operations, organizational, non-profit management, and process improvement experience and she’s willing to share it all with the fellows in the program! Her community action project has two prongs. One, build a series of CEUs for Maine educators to help them add project-based, nature-based learning projects to their curricula. Two, outreach to families in Maine about why nature-based, project-based learning is a great option, and how to advocate for more within their community schools.
Aubrae is always seeking her next adventure. She likes to spend time hanging out with friends and family, exploring Maine, eating good food and overthinking attributes to include in her bio.
Read more about Aubrae's project in "Place-Based Education and Civic Engagement" in our blog series, CEE-Change, Together.
Woodland Pond School on the Town!
The Project
Woodland Pond School will put together a program of public outreach events to engage parents and elementary-aged students in activities that highlight environmental education, climate change, civic engagement, and community service, as well as help to establish our school as a resource in these spaces, within our community. Each activity will end with at least two action items—ideas for activities or actions that the families can take to continue learning on their own and/or to begin effecting change in their households or communities. We will align these events with other local and regional events and programs, to maximize our potential reach and to tie into extant marketing efforts in order to minimize our costs.
Outcomes
We'll build awareness of EE/CE issues among local event organizers and help lessen the environmental impact of the events overall. As an example: We are working to co-host a children’s area at the Bangor Sidewalk Art Festival, scheduled for October 2, 2021. In the course of planning discussions, organizers talked about providing cases of bottled water to distribute among vendors throughout the day. Instead, we're establishing two water stations consisting of several five gallon Igloo water dispensers at each, along with compostable paper cups, and encouraging vendors to bring their own reusable water bottles to refill.