Danny Woolums

Danny Woolums is the environmental education program manager for Lexington, KY's Department of Environmental Quality & Public Works. He has over a decade of experience in environmental education and is a master certified professional environmental educator. Danny is also certified as a workshop facilitator in many leading environmental education curriculum and has led workshops across the state of Kentucky. He is the former chair of the LFUCG Environmental Commission, has served on the board of directors for the Kentucky Association for Environmental Education (KAEE) and was selected as a 2021 CEE-Change fellow through NAAEE. Danny loves working with teachers in the ongoing process of inspiring our youth to be engaged in shaping our tomorrow.

Danny enjoys kayaking and hiking with friends. He’d love to one day scuba dive along the coral reefs off the northern coast of Honduras, the country where his mother’s family is from.

2021 CEE-Change Fellowship Project: Lexington’s Youth Environmental Academy (YEA)

Project Background
In 2017, the City of Lexington created the Citizens’ (now renamed Community) Environmental Academy (CEA) to empower residents to be effective agents of change while working with the city. In 2018, the Teachers’ Environmental Academy (TEA) launched with a similar objective of making the city’s work and infrastructure more understandable to teachers and, as a result, their students. A new academy model is being developed to target high school students based on these existing models. The Youth Environmental Academy will connect students to internships, job shadowing opportunities and eventually, jobs within city government while also empowering them to develop projects to improve their own neighborhoods. All of the academy models have been about bringing people to the table who may have some interest, but didn’t know where to begin.

The Project
Our Youth Environmental Academy (YEA) will focus on students who have shown civic engagement by joining their neighborhood youth council. The youth involved in the neighborhood councils tend to come from underserved communities, both economically and socially. Based on a study done by the city and the Kentucky Association for Environmental Education last summer, these students have limited exposure to the outdoors, career options, or travel.

The YEA

Like the other academies, YEA will be about education, experiences and collective action. Participants will be given a pool of funding to implement a project related to the academy in their neighborhoods. Up to $15,000 will be available for projects related to water quality and waste management. The City of Lexington will support the students in implementing their projects. To reinforce the message about student empowerment, YEA participants will travel to other parts of the country to learn about similar work being done by their peers. These students will share their experiences to inspire, educate and empower each other to continue to pursue their related civic involvement and career pursuits.

Read more about Danny's project in "Environmental Leadership Project Connecting Youth to Their Communities" in our blog series, CEE-Change, Together.