NextGen Rochester recently awarded Rochester Ecology Partners a $3000 grant to launch our Neighborhood Nature: Wild Winter Adventure program with youth from Agape Haven of Abundance. Rochester Ecology Partners will take 20-30 youth from Agape Haven of Abundance on 3 adventures around Rochester, exploring an urban, suburban, and rural wild place for Neighborhood Nature: Wild Winter Adventures.
We are excited to announce that Rochester Ecology Partners (REP) was awarded a $5,000 grant the Browncroft Pediatric Research Foundation to coalesce the science behind the benefits of nature-based learning with the health and wellness of Rochester’s children. In addition, REP will leverage this grant to develop a tool to assess the impact of our programs on health and social/emotional wellbeing of participants. This project will help bring forward the ultimate benefits found from REP’s educational programming and mission to connect all people to nature where they live, work, and play.
How many of the 22 County Parks did you get to this year? 2022 is about to come to an end and it is a good time to check in and wrap things up for the 22 in 22 project. Our goal was to create a community effort that would lead to more awareness of the natural beauty in our parks, greater connection among our neighbors, and ultimately a healthier community. This project took on a life of its own and by many measures it was a huge success.
We were recently discussing what to call time spent connected to nature. One research article compared “green time” to “screen time”. It is a clever rhyme but this time of year it is hard to think of time outside as green time. More like “gray time”. If we are being a little more generous about how colorful the world is here this time of year “brown time” might work. Whatever you call it some green, gray, and brown in our lives is very beneficial. This is especially true if you share this time with someone else.
