Save Our Wild Isles Community Fund has provided £4,550 of match funding
Wildscreen ARK: Connecting Kids with Nature
Bristol, England, United Kingdom
Aim
Wildscreen ARK connects young people and teachers with nature by providing free, trusted, downloadable climate and biodiversity resources.
Help us directly connect 3000 young people from underserved communities with nature and bring free, trusted and engaging learning resources to schools across the UK.
Wildscreen ARK is a free, online nature education hub for kids, launching in early 2024.
With your funding, it will offer free, trusted resources that empower young people to take action for nature.
The Aviva Save our Wild Isle Community Fund provides 2:1 match funding. A donation of £50 will fund the development, testing and delivery of workshops for 60 students. We aim to reach 3000 students from underserved communities with this campaign.
We would like to extend an exclusive invite to anyone who donates £250 (which will be matched at 2:1, tripling your donation to £750!) to the Official ARK Launch Party.
Why is Wildscreen ARK needed?
The need to connect young people with nature has never been greater. Recent findings by Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust discovered that young people, aged 7-13, are becoming less connected with nature and struggle to identify the most basic, commonplace species.
Furthermore, 42% of young people say they learnt a little, hardly anything or nothing about the environment at school, and 75% of teachers feel they haven’t had adequate training to educate students about climate change (Teach the Future 2017-2022).
How does Wildscreen ARK fix this?
Wildscreen ARK will:
- Provide free teaching resources for teachers focusing on climate science, biodiversity, and positive action for nature, to empower young people to make a difference locally.
- Teachers will receive training to deliver the resources so they can do so with confidence.
How will our target of £22,500 be spent?
We will:
- Create at least 6 free learning initiatives about UK nature to be piloted within Bristol.
- Resources (such as handouts, lesson plans, presentations, and practical activities) will be available to download and access via Wildscreen ARK.
- Resources will teach about local UK species and conservation, get children out in nature and provide the tools for them to make their own conservation campaigns.
- Provide in-person training to Bristol-based teachers to deliver Wildscreen ARK resources and increase their confidence in teaching about nature and climate change.
The pilot will reach 3,000 students from underserved communities within Bristol, creating a blueprint for wider UK-wide distribution. We aim to reach 60,000 young people within 2 years.
What if we raise more than our target?
If we exceed our target, we will:
- Extend the program of outreach to more schools nationwide, prioritising those in areas of high deprivation.
- Deliver additional teacher training and develop additional free education resources to support the new GCSE in Natural History - (focused on changing habitats, species identification, and conservation)
- Develop additional Wildscreen ARK features that increase the impact of existing resources, for example by signposting local conservation organisations and volunteering opportunities.
Who we are
Wildscreen is a UK charity that promotes natural world engagement and education through film and photography. We envision a world where natural world storytelling is inclusive, accessible and impactful, and where nature is protected and thriving.
Our aims are to:
- Facilitate and celebrate natural world storytelling.
- Cultivate the next generation of storytellers.
- Connect creativity with natural world science.
- Promote nature conservation through natural world education.
This project successfully funded on 15th November 2023