City Parks Foundation is thrilled to announce the online release of its CityParks Green Girls Empowered by ING National Curriculum on December 17, 2021. The curriculum, launched in Spring 2021 to a pilot group and now for use by educators nationwide, features the award-winning Green Girls STEM curriculum. Adapted from its New York City focus, the curriculum has a broader, national emphasis on climate change and environmental stewardship through experiential learning in parks and other open spaces. CPF educators will lead two free online orientation sessions to introduce the curriculum on December 17, 2021 from 03:30 p.m. – 05:30 p.m. ET and March 04, 2022 from 03:30 p.m. – 05:30 p.m. ET; pre-registration is required here.
The orientation sessions will provide an overview of the Green Girls Empowered by ING curriculum introducing the lessons’ format, resources available, and how each lesson plan integrates STEM, experiential learning, and youth development concepts. Participants will receive tips on establishing local partnerships, peer mentorship, and advocacy tools to help enhance and ensure successful programs. Whether choosing to implement one lesson or all of them, orientation participants will learn how to fully utilize the concepts and elements targeted to both instructors and students.
Winner of the inaugural Climate Change Award by the National Summer Learning Association, the Green Girls Empowered by ING program uses experiential learning in parks, forests and waterways to offer New York City adolescent girls after-school and summer programming that focuses on environmental science, encouraging girls to recognize their potential as scientists and stewards of natural resources. With support from ING, the Green Girls national curriculum is available for use free of charge, as both an after-school and a summer program. The curriculum focuses on climate change, urban water bodies and forests, and strategies for stewarding and advocating for our essential resources. Also integrated are youth development concepts of self and social awareness encouraging young women to build healthy relationships with each other and their mentors.
Nearly 20 years ago, City Parks Foundation created Green Girls to excite young women in 6th-8th grades about STEM learning. The program transforms local public parklands, forests and waterways into learning laboratories, as Green Girls engage in hands-on experiments and community service. Students learn about a variety of potential careers in the sciences – an industry where over 75% of the workforce is male, and the program also facilitates social-emotional learning at this critical time in a young woman’s development, through discussions, team-building activities focused on female empowerment, individual voice, and self-awareness, aiming to foster healthy relationship development between students.
“We are so thrilled to offer this curriculum training program to all, which we tested out earlier this year with great success to a small group of engaged educators who were looking for alternative ways to engage students outdoors,” said Chrissy Word, Director of Education at City Parks Foundation. “Educators can apply this curriculum through in-person instruction to help teach young women to become environmental changemakers by using parks and open spaces for experiential learning. By joining our upcoming information sessions to introduce the curriculum, educators will come away with innovative tips and tools that will lead to meaningful science lessons as well as advocacy for and restoration of our natural areas by young women, particularly young women of color.”
“ING is pleased to support this important step in expanding the reach of the Green Girls STEM curriculum by making it available online. We have seen firsthand how this unique, hands-on program is not just educating girls but inspiring them to think about the role they can have in areas such as sustainability and environmental science,” said Ana Carolina Oliveira, Head of Sustainable Finance, ING Americas. “Providing these types of educational opportunities play an important role in empowering the next generation of female leaders who will have a positive and lasting impact on our planet.”
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About City Parks Foundation
At City Parks Foundation, we are dedicated to invigorating and transforming parks into dynamic, vibrant centers of urban life through sports, arts, community building and education programs for all New Yorkers. Our programs — located in hundreds of parks, recreation centers and public schools across New York City — reach thousands of people each year. Our ethos is simple: thriving parks mean thriving communities.
About CityParks Learn
CityParks Learn, our standards-aligned environmental education programs, helps students experience the fun of science, while learning about their relationship to the natural world and the ways in which they can protect our environment. We provide STEM-based environmental science programs for thousands of elementary, middle, and high school students throughout New York City, through school-day, after school, and summer programming. Also offered are credit-bearing training and paid internships for high school and college students as well as teacher training in conducting science lessons using parks as outdoor classrooms.
About ING Americas
ING Americas is the brand name of ING’s wholesale business in the Americas region, and a part of ING Group N.V. (“ING”), a global financial services company of Dutch origin with a network spanning 40 countries. ING has more than 54,000 employees offer financial services to customers in over 40 countries. Sustainability forms an integral part of ING’s strategy, evidenced by ING’s ranking as Leader in the banks industry group by Sustainalytics and ‘A’ rating in MSCI’s ratings universe. ING Group shares are included in major sustainability and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) index products of leading providers STOXX, Morningstar and FTSE Russell. ING Americas offers a full array of wholesale financial products, such as commercial lending, corporate finance and a full range of financial markets, products and services.
