What’s your million smile idea? It used to be a thing for people to ask “What’s your million-dollar idea?” as if the money was the outcome. If whatever you were thinking about doing generated $1,000,000.00 you could consider yourself successful.
At Rochester Ecology Partners, we have settled on smiles as one of our main measures of success.
Sure, there are other important outcomes – improved academics, increased physical activity, and meaningful relationships, but all of these come with smiles. The idea that all of it can happen at once is one of the things that differentiates our approach from others.
The challenge we face is that it is actually quite hard to measure smiles. Did we catch that time a child smiled when they found a crayfish in their net? They have been smiling the whole time – Do we count it as one? Are all 85 of these children smiling right now?
Smiles per hour is one tool used to measure good times, and I found a bunch of websites that said children smile 400 times a day. (I couldn’t find a source, but without a research-based statistic, we will go with it – feel free to share a better answer). This works out to 33 smiles an hour in a 12-hour day of being awake.
There is definitely research that children are happier outside. If I guess that a child is 3 times happier outside than inside on their phone or doing worksheets, I’ll estimate that children smile 99 times an hour while they are on a field study or nearby nature lesson with us.
During the 2024-25 school year, our WildWonder program served 2454 children at 19 schools through 355 different experiences across Greater Rochester.
An hour Nearby Nature lesson about the senses on school grounds with 25 fifth graders = 825 smiles
A half day of Bugs!Bugs!Bugs in Ellison Park with 23 Second Graders = 1897 smiles
A day of Winter Survival activities and sledding in Mendon Ponds with 90 high schoolers = 11,880 smiles
I am confident saying that nature-based learning with Rochester Ecology Partners led to at least 1,224,283 smiles last school year.
I haven’t even calculated smiles for our Neighboorhood Nature out of school program (so many smiles!), the Growing Good food and farm summer enrichment program (one smile for every raspberry picked), our Environmental Health Ambassadors High School Intern program (they really do smile when they are outside), and our community events (seeing families smile together is a highlight).
Rochester Ecology Partners is our million (billion?) smile idea.
Creating joyful experiences has become our main product, and our currency is the happiness that comes with them. We have done all we can to invest our resources in what we believe our community needs now and in the future. The million smile idea we had – the belief that we can add value to our community through efforts to help everyone find nature is paying off.
