As a Community Health major as California State University, Dominguez Hills, I’ve focused on creating, implementing, and evaluating programs meant to bridge many health disparities in the United States. However after working a couple years in the healthcare industry, I realized that working in the healthcare wasn’t for me. So when it came time to design my own project for my senior project, I decided to pivot my skills to create a program focused on environmental awareness and wildlife conservation. The idea bloomed into a much greater project than I originally imagined. I’m dedicating this page to my original senior project, the seed where WILD Education was planted. To learn more about what WILD Education has become and future plans, I’ve put more information in my About Me page

Typically, community health programs begin with a question usually related to desired outcome. “How do we get uninsured individuals healthcare?” was the beginning of one of my other mock programs and the health related goal was simply: getting individuals insured and medical care. However, this project started with a desire to teach. The summer before my senior semester, I had the opportunity to teach marine biology to students entering middle school and I left that experience thinking, “This is what I want to do. Educate people on the environment and wildlife.” With this thought, I began planning a program around the activity: introducing students to the natural world. By giving students this opportunity, I hoped to impact conservation in ways more than just my individual actions. 

The majority of my program consisted of how to implement lesson plans to students but one major part of any program is measuring success. This narrowed my focus on one main environmental hazard: air pollution, as it would be near impossible to measure so many different outcomes. My program began to take shape. Its goal would be to implement after school classes focused on environmental hazards and conservation with an emphasis on air pollution. To measure progress, these classes would happen 3 years: 3rd grade, 7th grade, and 12th grade. The idea behind staggering this years is that lesson plans can be adapted to age groups and concepts can be built on previous knowledge. As students got older, they would also be able to become more involved with projects, providing a more meaningful experience.  Below I’ve attached a logic model for the original plan which give a brief overview of the program.

Living in Southern California, a region of the United States with one of the highest levels of air pollution, the health effects are clear. High rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases are correlated to areas of high air pollution. The foundation of my research question is the idea that education and knowledge are strong enough to influence people to take actions past what a community program can do. By educating students as they grow up, this program hopes to inspire them to take action long after they have left school. 

Although I would love to share the entire project details, I’m not too sure that would be very fun to read. So I wanted to highlight some unique aspects of the program I had hoped to implement. The first idea is installing open source citizen science monitors at schools. This would not only provide the school with their own data, it would be able to provide future programs a source of data without costing them any funding. By using open source hardware, we are also able to involve students in a more meaningful way, especially as they got older. This may be ambitious, but I had hoped that once the students reached 12th grade and the final year of our program, they would have the opportunity to create their own project with the program support. The example that always came to mind was students installing air quality monitors in areas outside the school like local parks. They would receive the monitor from us and take responsibility for monitoring it after they had graduated. 

One of the second ideas I was excited about was introducing sneak peeks into what jobs someone could get if they wanted to pursue a careers. Many of my ideas for lesson plans involved activities such as bug pinning, creating educational posters, and designing displays and dioramas. These activities would be designed to introduce the idea that conservation is more than animal care. Education and outreach play a huge part and there are many ways to help and participate in this field. 

This program, although I believe can be executed, does not have plans to be realized. A huge obstacle is funding. A program that follows a cohort of students for 10 years requires an enormous amount of funding. However, I still believe that education about the environment and wildlife, especially as a young age, is essential in the long term success of protecting our natural world. Conservation will not be solved in my lifetime. The list of animals becoming endangered is growing. In the next couple of years, many animals I know will never be seen by even the next generation. However this does not mean that my work should be thrown away to be forgotten. I have become inspired to share my ideas in the hope that I might inspire others to implement the importance of environmental conservation into their lesson plans. Like I said before, conservation will not be solved in my lifetime but I hope that my efforts in creating WILD Education will have a positive domino effect, greater than anything I could have done in one lifetime. I appreciate anyone who takes the time to read this page or any other pages on this website and I sincerely hope that you are able to find something to help move the field of conservation forward.