Helping children learn about environmental education

24 Apr 2024

Monday 22 April was Earth Day — a chance to demonstrate a commitment to environmental education and to create awareness around the various issues that threaten the environment and endanger the planet. 

This Earth Day, Keep New Zealand Beautiful has asked for your support: to help ensure that Kiwi kids from all backgrounds continue to receive quality environmental education for free.

Keep New Zealand Beautiful has been around since 1967, providing the largest environmental education framework to students and the community, with the objective of combatting climate change through interactive programmes that are focused on creating the next generation of Tidy Kiwis.

Despite being named in the Litter Act 1979 as "the body primarily responsible for the promotion of litter control in New Zealand", they receive no ongoing funding from central government.

It is the right of all young people to have access to environmental education regardless of any historical, sociocultural, geographical and/or economic barriers that they may encounter.

This is why, unlike most environmental education service providers, Keep New Zealand Beautiful offer all of their lesson plans, teaching materials, facilitated classroom sessions, field trips, mentoring and professional development to teachers and students for free.

In 2021 they tendered for and were successful in securing a two-year project, funded in part by the Ministry for the Environment. This project included the expansion of their environmental education framework and the delivery of 11 environmental programmes to nearly 1,000 schools and over 144,000 students.

Unfortunately, this funding has come to an end, putting the future delivery of these free climate literacy programmes at risk.

CEO Heather Saunderson says, “At a time when public spending is under scrutiny, we’d hate to see the community's investment in creating these programmes go to waste.

"We’d also hate to see marginalised youth missing out on invaluable environmental education, which is why we’re asking Kiwis to help us raise $150,000 to sustain our school programmes and to ensure that we can continue to provide them for free until we’re able to secure additional funding from alternative avenues ”.

Show your support to raise over $150,000 to provide Keep New Zealand Beautiful’s free environmental education programmes beyond Term 2, 2024.

By donating $5 you’ll be providing environmental education to one student for a year. $150 will educate an entire class of Tidy Kiwis, and $1,375 will provide programming to a whole average sized primary school in New Zealand.  Resene has been a prouder supporter of Keep New Zealand Beautiful for over 20 years so we hope you’ll join us to help.

Donate here!

Published: 24 Apr 2024