RiverKids

Website

http://www.neuseriver.org/riverkids/challenge.html

Describe the creative youth microprojects that your nonprofit would fundraise for if you win.

With Give for Youth support, the Neuse Riverkeeper Foundation would be able to strengthen and expand our popular RiverKids program, an environmental awareness and education program that builds connections and appreciation for environmental conservation. Through a dynamic classroom curriculum, expert mentoring and guidance, and hands-on outdoor, mud-on-your boots, dirty hands and big smiles activities, RiverKids teaches young people the importance of protecting their water resources and natural surroundings. Give for Youth support would mean more muddy boots, more dirty hands, more big smiles, and a generation who better understand our relationship with the world in which we live.

Explain how possibly gaining funding through the Give for Youth platform would better able you to complete these projects.

To us, more funding means more RiverKids. For our communities this means more young people committed to protecting, stewarding, and improving the water resources and natural environment in their communities. Our program is focused on the Neuse River Basin and watershed and we serve grade school, middle school, and high school students in both public and private schools. Additional funding means more classrooms to celebrate science learning and expanded conservation awareness in the community. More importantly, it means we can grow larger the next generation of environmental stewards that will protect safe, clean water, and a love for our natural resources, building blocks in the foundation of vibrant local economies and healthy communities.

Describe why your nonprofit is innovative and entrepreneurial.

“All politics is local,” is a saying that can easily apply to conservation. Many environmental organizations cast too wide a net in an effort to address EVERY challenge or threat to natural resources. The Neuse Riverkeeper Foundation, and by extension, our RiverKids program sharpens the scope, keeping it local, and focuses on stewardship and conservation of the tangible Neuse River Basin. Through teaching a core curriculum focused locally, we work to inspire a passion for the Neuse, first, and to show the interdependence of the river environment to those dynamic ecosystems that surround it. Then, quite simply, our innovation is to allow young people to apply their growing world view, rapidly-developing critical thinking skills, and sharpen their creative problem solving abilities to the many challenges of conservation. Our RiverKids learn first-hand that they can make a positive impact on the entire world by starting with their local river.

Discussion

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