Ten Strands
“The Sand Hill Foundation staff is committed to understanding, supporting, and expanding San Mateo County teachers’ ability to integrate hands-on, environment-based experiences into their classrooms and outdoors, which brings us closer to our goal of environmentally literacy for all California students.” — Karen Cowe, CEO
All students in California deserve the opportunity to understand, interact, and connect with their environment in meaningful ways that promote learning and growth. Ten Strands was founded in 2012 with the belief that all students in California can become environmentally literate when there is a robust system of support in place to support their journey. Ten Strands’ approach is to partner strategically to construct that system of support at all levels of the K-12 public school system.
For example, Ten Strands fosters statewide efforts to infuse environmental topics into core subjects, and works with teachers to use the environment as a context for learning in science, history-social science, English language arts, and more. Over the past four years, support from Sand Hill Foundation has helped expand environment-based education in San Mateo County public schools in preparation for new state-mandated Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).
After underwriting program research in 2014, the Sand Hill Foundation has been the lead funder of the San Mateo Environmental Learning Collaborative since the program’s start in 2015.
The Collaborative has provided San Mateo County teachers with high-quality professional learning each year by partnering with local community-based environmental education organizations to create Next Generation Science Standards- and inquiry-based, interactive units of study that use the local environment as context.
As a result of the collaboration between Ten Strands, Sand Hill Foundation, and the San Mateo County Office of Education on NGSS teacher professional learning, environmental literacy has become one of the main strategic priorities at the County Office. In 2017, San Mateo County was the first in California to hire an Environmental Education Coordinator to create equitable access to environmental experiences across all its 23 school districts.
