University of Wisconsin-Madison
IN-25: Innovation B

Earth Partnership (EP) is housed at the UW-Madison Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture and promotes holistic sustainability through native habitat restoration, community learning, and land stewardship. EP collaborates with diverse communities to create vibrant outdoor learning spaces using a curriculum-based 10-step ecological restoration process. Restoration education training is offered to a variety of learners through teacher professional development, youth programming, and family and community engagement. EP's vision is for communities across the world to be actively engaged in ecological restoration that connects people to the land, and each other, through a commitment to stewardship. EP runs three shared but separate initiatives to realize their vision: 1) Indigenous Arts and Sciences (IAS): IAS is a collaboration with Native communities in Wisconsin, rooted in the Native values of respect, relationship, and stewardship. By working with children, families, communities, and educators, IAS provides culturally relevant learning experiences and career exploration in environmental education. 2) Latino Earth Partnership (LEP): LEP promotes collaboration between educators and Latino communities by engaging youth and families in culturally-based ecological restoration. Environmental stewardship is integrated with culturally authentic resources, Spanish language curriculum, and citizen science process skills like data collection, analysis, habitat restoration, and water stewardship. This program fosters awareness, sensitivity, understanding, and participation in resolving environmental challenges. 3) Global Earth Partnership (GEP): The Global Earth Partnership network includes Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Ecuador. Like other Earth Partnership programs, GEP promotes collaboration between educators and communities by engaging youth and families in culturally-based ecological restoration. Periodically, GEP international internships and service learning courses are offered in conjunction with the UW-Madison Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture. These are all ongoing programs and you can see a summary of program accomplishments from 2018 here: https://mailchi.mp/199e31a1ba6b/enewsletter-fall-1845765. Furthermore, significant achievements by the EP IAS program led to the recent receipt of a University-Community Partnership Award (https://earthpartnership.wisc.edu/2019/07/01/earth-partnership-ias-receives-university-community-partnership-award/).