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No Child Left Inside: Education Advocacy and NWF Affiliates Work to Connect Children to Nature

(National Wildlife Federation)

NWF affiliate engagement has been crucial to the recent successes in our education advocacy campaigns.  In September, the House of Representatives passed the No Child Left Inside Act by an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 293 to 109. NWF affiliates helped organize a letter from 45 national and regional sportsmens’ organizations, generate over 38,000 pro-NCLI emails to Congress, and build the coalition to over 700 organizations. Our affiliates gathered key intelligence from the Rules Committee and even helped convince a Congressman to withdraw a devastating amendment.

Education advocacy is working with our regional reps, regional centers, and affiliates in Georgia, Michigan, Colorado, Alaska, North Carolina, Texas, Maryland, and Kansas to promote state efforts to connect people with nature. To assist these efforts, we are creating comprehensive state model legislation that addresses environmental education, recreation, health, and the built environment to disseminate to state-wide RND coalitions. We will also create a web-based clearinghouse of policy resources, including legislation, gubernatorial executive orders, and school board policies, and an e-advocacy tool kit.  Our goal is to launch this resource in mid-January 2008.

Finally, NWF is petitioning the U.S. Surgeon General to recommend that Americans engage in a daily Green Hour. The goal of this campaign is to elevate nature deficit to a national public health issue and to establish “Green Hour” as a recognized public health strategy to support active living. We’re on to something with this campaign - in just over a month, 170 organizations, including 30 affiliate organizations, and 15,000 citizens have signed on.