Keep Cincinnati Beautiful
1115 Bates Avenue
Cincinnati, OH 45225
Environmental Education Program
Grant Application:
Keep Cincinnati Beautiful’s Environmental Education (EE) program connects underserved children with the environment to help them grow, learn, and develop personal responsibility for their community. Our catalog of resources is designed to complement the Ohio Learning Standards and provide students a consistent environmental message that reinforces environmental literacy and inspires stewardship for the environment. Due to the COVID 19 pandemic our classroom presentations, assemblies, and select field trips have been temporarily suspended. Our new EE program website hosts exclusive, and well crafted digital content including presentations, video series, worksheets and more, utilized not only by teachers but is available to any online and homeschooled students. We anticipate reaching 20,000 viewers this academic year.
Goals:
The original goals of the program for which we received funding were to add 5 new virtual classroom presentations and associated content, 1 new local virtual field trip, and 2 new video series. The programs were to be created in the hopes of reaching 20,000 students in the 2021-22 school years.
Grant Evaluation Report:
Given staff turnover in early 2022, along with programmatic changes in the direction of education goals at KCB, additions to the EcoEd website slowed and our programming moved back in the direction of in-person engagement. While we fell short on two of the three goals listed in the original application, we exceeded expectations in one identified area and were able to continue providing educational programming despite lack of staff and the changing needs of a post-covid era.
Results:
Our digital education website is currently live at kcbecoed.org. The creation and maintenance of the site including affiliated educational materials has enabled the Education team at KCB to continue serving young people across the city and country as needs and accessibility of students has shifted. Our ethos that education should be free and easily accessible for everyone was a motivating factor of the creation of the EcoEd website that continues on today as our ability to engage with young people in the community has once again shifted.
Our original goals were to add 5 new virtual classroom presentations and associated content, 1 new local virtual field trip, and 2 new video series. We are happy to announce that we added two new virtual field trip videos in December 2021 and January 2022. The videos feature the Rumpke Sanitary Landfill and the Cincinnati Zoo, providing students with behind-the-scenes access from the safety of their homes and classrooms. We were able to create a new arts-based video series titled Growing Green. This series features 9 episodes, each highlighting a different, local artist using their medium to teach educational topics. Three new presentations focusing on litter and recycling topics were created as well as a 5-video series on TikTok.
The EcoEd website hosts multiple presentations and virtual field trips that meet Ohio Learning Standards and connects young people to additional resources both online and locally. Our videos are also available on Youtube and current analytics show that from October 2021-October 2022, our digital education videos received 5,160 views with a total watch time of 286 hours. Our educational TikTok series received a total of 2,755 views. Unfortunately, there was an oversight with the Google Sites platform and analytics for our EcoEd website were not enabled. We are unable to receive retroactive insights but have enabled analytics to collect data for the future.
Website:
http://www.keepcincinnatibeautiful.org Amount: $30,000
Date: October 2021
