Best Practices Tool for EE Program Development

Thank you to all who contributed feedback on the Best Practices in EE Program Development tool!

Best Practices Tool for EE Program Development.pdf

EENM has created a “Best Practices in EE Program Development” tool for use by our EE community. This tool, based upon the North American Association for Environment Education’s Guidelines for Excellence, establishes a set of standards for the development of high-quality EE programming.

In order to elevate the field of EE in New Mexico and provide impactful educational opportunities to diverse student audiences, the EE community must be intentional about the types of programming it provides. The Best Practices tool distills a variety of research-based recommendations into a series of questions organized by program components. We hope that organizations will use these questions not only to guide the development of new programming, but also to improve and expand existing programs. This tool can also serve as a resource for funders as they work to identify and support high-quality EE in New Mexico.

As we developed this resource, we incorporated feedback from our EE community and New Mexico funders of EE about the need for a simplified and accessible form of the Guidelines for Excellence for Nonformal EE Programs developed by the National Project for Excellence in Environmental Education and supported by the North American Association for Environmental Education. The first draft of this tool was released during the Environmental Literacy Summit in November 2017, where we received feedback and thoughts from more than 40 EE leaders. The second draft was open for feedback online from January through February, 2018. The final draft of the tool was released on March 1, 2018.

Thank you to McCune Charitable Foundation for their generous funding and support of this new resource!