Policy and Advocacy

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!

In July 2020, the Inside-Outside advisory group collaborated to write a position statement on outdoor learning. This position statement quickly gained the attention of tens of thousands of people interested in how schools can transition learning outdoors as a way to safely reopen in the fall. During NatStart's Nature-Based Early Learning Virtual Conference, Inside-Outside organized a panel of experts—including outdoor educators, administrators, and a pediatrician—to further discuss the benefits and opportunities of outdoor learning during this uncertain time.

In this webinar, the Natural Start Alliance, National Wildlife Federation's Early Childhood Health Outdoors (ECHO), and members of the Seven November team (a strategic communications firm) share the findings from a comprehensive messaging analysis initiative around early childhood education.

The state of Washington took a significant step forward in October 2019 when it became the first state in the US to license preschools that operate entirely outdoors. This webinar features the Outdoor Preschool Pilot Program in Washington state.