Discovering Nature As Our Greatest Teacher, Healer, and Classroom

Happy first day of fall and belated back-to-school! With InDiGO, summers are essential bridges between school years, and summer camps are among the best opportunities to unite youth across cultural and economic barriers. Summer's freedom from the standards and structures of the school year allows adults to teach relevant, meaningful skills that engage students' authentic interests and ignite their intrinsic motivation. Camp  lights up children's natural love of learning, power of healing, and capacity to shine. Increasing access to outdoor summer camps is one strategy InDiGO utilizes toward realizing our vision:

Nurturing healthy relationships with ourselves, each other,

and the Earth.

During the summer months, many of Baltimore's youth experience "summer learning loss" or "summer slide," compounded by excessive screen time. Additionally, a "summer social slide" occurs, disrupting our young people's social and emotional development. Too many youth get siloed or stagnate rather than branching out and growing over the summer. InDiGO's summer programs are part of a holistic, direct service movement that aims to improve the summer and year-round ecology of educational and economic opportunities for youth in Baltimore City.

Nature and outdoor education are essential components of healthy and holistic learning for children, and decades of research have firmly established the positive outcomes and benefits. InDiGO's work focuses on actualizing these benefits at scale across the city. Our summer program is called "Be The Star You Are," which refers to InDiGO's approach. We begin by connecting students to the fact that we are all made of elements born in the stars. Students learn to regard themselves and each other as stars while they develop the awareness and skills to make space for everyone to shine. Check out our music video all about this concept!

The number of youth we serve is increasing yearly, and we are so grateful to the local and national foundations who supported our work this summer. Our students had a blast InDiGOing at Arlington Elementary, featuring hours of fun in our new outdoor classroom. We lit up the school's kiln for the first time with Clayworks, and students received stellar Robotics with Vex and Academics with Springboard. Thank you to all our collaborators who were part of this summer's magic!

53 of the 111 young people in our programs this summer received free transportation and tuition to attend Adventure Day Camp and Overnight Camp in the Great Outdoors at Pearlstone. With 70 camper weeks available for day camp and 20 camper weeks available for overnight camp, we were able to offer a more profound and transformative experience of multiple camp weeks in the Great Outdoors to 37 of the 53 children while the rest rocked out with us at school. 

We aim to expand opportunities for Baltimore City youth to attend at least one week of outdoor summer camp each summer. Along with language barriers for families learning English and technology challenges for households with limited internet access, transportation, and tuition can also be significant obstacles. InDiGO is leading the charge in the Baltimore area to increase access to outdoor summer camps for families who would not otherwise have access.

This summer, we fostered togetherness and compassion through team-building games, songs, stories, integrative projects, and creating opportunities for the kids to shine. One of our wondrous projects was a music video called "I Am A Star." The song is written by famed InDiGO team members Gino Hannah and Zen Xaria (a.k.a. DJ Star Fox) and highlights some of the SEL themes of the summer. "In space, there's enough space; we can make space for everyone to shine."

InDiGO's framework interfaces seven whole-child-centered principles with seven holistic health and development aspects. These innate connections get expressed integratively through activities that naturally connect across subjects. InDiGO integrates Academics, the Arts, and SEL with Nature to design UNIFYING experiences that simultaneously meet many educational outcomes and state standards. Our music video project integrated Music, Science, Videography, Visual Art, Choreography, Project-Based Learning, and Team Building while combining SEL competencies with outdoor learning.

InDiGO's facilitation strategies are rooted in children's nature. Children naturally light up and engage when we sing, play, dance, explore, and develop healthy friendships with peers and safe, supportive relationships with adults. 

Through intentional physical, mental, and sensory awareness warmups, we integrate music and movement to emotionally and physiologically prepare students to be present and ready to learn. This progression at the beginning of each day also establishes expectations and accountability. InDiGO's Agreements are: 1. Respect and Protect Your Self. 2. Respect and Protect Each Other. 3. Respect and Protect The Earth.

We learned about the water cycle, composting, fire safety, responsible harvesting, and forestry. We discussed care for our environment and developed ownership over our school and community grounds as protectors of the Earth. We navigated the harsh realities of the smoke that traveled from Canada to Baltimore, making the air unsafe. We learned about our power to be a force of change as environmental stewards.

Please explore our website and stay tuned for our upcoming books and other resources to learn more about our inclusion, engagement, and holistic youth development methodologies.

Overnight camp is one of the most healing, transformative, and empowering experiences we can offer our young people. Baltimore City students attended camp with youth of different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Together, they shared space in the bunkhouses and conquered their fears on the high ropes course and night hikes. While learning about our watershed, they walked in a tributary of the Liberty Reservoir, the water that runs to our homes and schools. They learned to make fire, build a survival shelter, carve spoons and bowls like our ancestors, and care for the forest. They harvested fresh fruits and vegetables from the farm and cooked delicious dishes in our playful cooking competition. Most importantly, students developed a sense of belonging within our environment and regional ecology. They developed lifelong skills for resilience, cross-cultural collaboration, and environmental stewardship.

They fed the fire of their own education.

Five days per week for seven weeks, ten Black and Latinx students boarded the bus from school in Baltimore City to travel up to Adventure Day Camp at Pearlstone, stopping along the way to pick up Jewish and white children from other city and county neighborhoods. (If you're curious about capitalization when discussing "racial" groups, please check out this article). While race, racism, anti-semitism, white supremacy, and tons of other isms and phobias of people or groups are very presently actual, they are social constructs and ontologically false. We are all one family of Homo Sapiens with unique mixtures of our shared ancestry encoded in our DNA. Homo Sapiens Sapiens, the subspecies referring to modern humans, literally translates to "Man Wise Wise." We would be true to our wisdom to align in constellations together and treat everyone like the stars they are. 

"In space, there's enough space; we can make space for everyone to shine."

The symbolism of children from different backgrounds and neighborhoods riding the bus together echoes the progress of the Civil Rights Movement. It reminds us how simple it can be to unite across cultures. Many of the issues we face are systemic, and we can easily overcome the barriers that divide us through simple solutions like including kids from different backgrounds and neighborhoods in the same camp. Honoring everyone for who they are and learning from each other helps us all be true to ourselves and shine like the stars we are. 

Simple does not mean easy, though, and JEDI (justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion) work takes investment and perseverance. With hard work and a lot more funding, it would be possible to realize a baseline standard for JEDI in summer camps through policies and programs such as the following:

• Translating registration forms and software.
• Offering a minimum number of free and reduced tuition scholarships.
• Job training at the intersection of education and the environment.
• Year-round employment opportunities for 14 to 24-year-olds.
• Transportation routes to camps within and near the city each summer.

From the air we breathe to the food we eat, Nature is within and all around us. We drink the sun through our skin and use it to grow our bones. We oxygenate our blood by exchanging air with trees. Our bodies are made of mostly water. We are Nature.

Elements forged in stars are the building blocks of all life, including us. Yes, WE ARE STARS. All humans, including young people, have a unique light to shine, each with our particular path, purpose, and potential.

Thank you to Pearlstone for our third summer working together to increase access to their incredible day camp! Thank you to Burrell Motor Coach for getting the kids to and from camp safely and on-time each day! Thank you to I Love Baltimore Personal Tours for getting the kids to and from overnight camp with such care. Thank you to all of the talented camp counselors at Pearlstone! Thank you to all the InDiGO team members who helped 111 young people have a shining summer!

We can create systems that meet the needs of people if we put our hearts, minds, and dollars up to the task. We are grateful to Tolly Taylor and WBAL for supporting democracy through investigative journalism. The snowball vendor the Baltimore City Public Schools System (BCPSS) did not pay on time, started a snowball effect —barreling toward any  obstacles to best serving students in all of Maryland.

The people who are part of BCPSS are not to blame. It is simply time to create new systems to meet the evolving needs of students and make the most of the unprecedented investment in Maryland's education. It is our responsibility to unite as adults now for the highest good of children and future generations. The media does not have time to give the full context and details. The first video is one of the news clips from WBAL. Please read on and watch the next video for the full news conference. 

To all who care about Maryland’s future and, therefore, Maryland’s children. We are asking for your input and support in creating policy solutions to ensure the $3,800,000,000 investment you have made as taxpayers results in “Promise and opportunity for every Maryland child.”

“Prioritizing equity, the Blueprint prescribes new programs and innovative approaches to catalyze a world-renowned education system that aims to eradicate achievement gaps and ensures opportunity for every student, regardless of family income, race, ethnicity, or ability.”

We finally have the resources and support to “improve the quality of education in Maryland,” and we need your input as those raising and teaching the next generation of Maryland citizens. Please email us at [email protected] to receive a community participatory research survey and share your voice, vision, and ideas for solutions. 

Check out our impact spiral to visualize how our work with young people is inseparable from our work with adults, systems, policies, and research.

We know that health and education improve when we protect and respect the rights of children to clean water, air, and nurturing environments. It is time we create systems and policies that assure these fundamental rights to all children. In Baltimore City, InDiGO works on every level in concert with youth, teachers, school districts, government agencies, outdoor centers, and community organizations to help make the (COBOR) Baltimore Children’s Outdoor Bill of Rights a reality. We always care to remember that Nature is also within us. InDiGO’s programs make all of the rights in the COBOR a reality for our students, using a methodology that also honors Nature within them.

Please support us by forwarding this newsletter to anyone you know who may be interested in or inspired by our work. We are building a network of young people, educators, and advocates to help us discover Nature as our greatest teacher, healer, and classroom.