Policy and Advocacy

Join us for a webinar on Tuesday, December 9 at 1 PM ET to learn about Flourishing in Winter, a new research-based guidebook resource for early childhood cold-weather play.

In this webinar recording, hear from Dr. Aliza Yair and Kit Harrington about about the new comprehensive policy recommendations resource for communities, including regulatory agencies, in expanding children’s access to safe and high-quality outdoor and nature-based learning through policy.

Natural Start invited Sarah Heller, co-founder and former director of Fiddleheads Forest School, to share the process she developed at Fiddleheads to enroll families with equity in mind. Sarah has spent the last two years learning about enrollment practices and asking questions with the goal of learning how to build more equitable systems and reduce barriers to accessing nature-based education.

For years, Professor Julie Ernst at the University of Minnesota Duluth has been exploring how nature preschools affect children's curiosity, creativity, executive function skills, and more. In this forum, Julie shares her research and tools she has developed that help make the case for nature-based education.

Willamette Partnership’s Oregon Health & Outdoors Initiative partnered with outdoor early childhood experts across the country to develop the "Outdoor Preschool Policy Action Framework." The framework helps advocates — from parents, teachers, and administrators to elected officials — find a pathway to make outdoor preschool available to all. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to this work, so this resource identifies many potential options you can use to start moving your state along the pathway to make outdoor preschools available to everyone!