UAS Update: Annual Report 2020
Jan. 2, 2020
Hello, Squad Community! Many of you are back at school and work today, and we hope it's a peaceful adjustment. Some of you are with us at our first program of 2020! Today and tomorrow, we wrap our winter break programs with a Squad Whodunnit--the Case of the Polluted Waterways--and next week, we open registration for UAS Summer 2020 with an announcement through our UAS Update, the e-newsletter you're reading right now.
Each year, we share with you our accomplishments and challenges of the last year, and our dreams for the years to come. These annual reports are aimed at keeping you informed and encouraging you to stay engaged. It's not an exaggeration to say that we would not be us (UAS!) without you. Why? Because...
You send us your ideas--sometimes by text, late at night, when you're feeling inspired by an idea for the Squad.
You tell friends, families, colleagues, and the administration at your schools about us, and that has led to many wonderful partnerships and programs.
You connect us with people who you think would be a great guest educator or field trip host for our students.
You write us emails about when your child shared something she learned at the Squad, or tell us about a hike you took because you read about it right here, in the UAS Update.
You donate what you can, when you can, because you believe in what we're building.
2019 HIGHLIGHTS
We have had some wonderful highlights in 2019--new program educators, new grants and opportunities, a new registration system--and some significant challenges: funding that comes with a heavy load of compliance and reporting, insufficient funds to support the communities that we want and need to serve, and the daily struggle--a familiar one for small nonprofits--of balancing the immediate work of running our programs with long-term development and strategic work that is critical to keeping us growing AND sustainable.
Here is what 2019 looked like for the Squad. Do you have questions, concerns, or ideas? Would you like to visit our programs? Please get in touch with us:
General UAS inquiries: [email protected]
Elana Mintz, Executive Director: [email protected]
Christy Brock, Director of Programming: [email protected]
Phone number (voicemail only): 202-455-0390
A SQUAD DREAM BECOMES A REALITY. At the start of the 2019-20 school year, we opened registration for our school-year programs using a new registration database powered by a company called UltraCamp.
A new database may not seem glamorous, but for an organization like ours, with just two full-time employees and a network of part-time employees who help as they can, reducing our administrative burden to free up more time for programming and development work is critical.
We built our registration system in 2015 using the website builder Weebly, and although the price was right--we purchased a yearlong business plan for just $300--the manual work of preparing and updating registrations and rosters was not.
We talk a lot about how essential your donations are, and how every dollar matters. A large, early-2019 donation of $5000 allowed us to consider purchasing a new system and investing the time to implement it. The system will pay for itself because of the amount of time we are saving, every day, by automating many of our old processes, but these investments require research, patience, and new funding.
We still have a lot to learn, but the best news (we hope!), is for our Squad families. The system allows them to log in, create profiles for all members of the family, make and cancel reservations, change authorized pickups, and more.
Since September, over 225 families have set up accounts in our system, and as we prepare to open registration for UAS Summer 2020, those numbers are ticking up.
Eventually, we'd like to use this system so that everyone in our Squad community can register for programs, classes, and community events for all ages.
TWO NEW GRANTS! In 2019, UAS was awarded two new grants. One, from the DC Department of Energy and Environment, is for $20,000 and supports our project that will use Geocaching--a global scavenger hunt that we use as a teaching tool at the Squad to learn about history, architecture, the environment, and much more--to educate the public and raise awareness about stormwater runoff, its effects on the pollution of the Anacostia River, and how to mitigate it.
The project, called "Geocaching D.C.'s Waterways," is funding our work with local schools and communities through school partnerships, and through our full-day programs when schools are closed, to create a series of 5-6 geocaches that are the result of student research, urban hiking, and advocacy. Our partner schools are:
We are visiting each of these schools during the 2019-20 academic year to work with students in classrooms and in their communities to research local environmental challenges and improvements, and to look for potential hiding places for our geocaches. We will work with students at our full-day, out-of-school-time programs that are located near the National Arboretum.
We are incredibly excited about this grant award, and the opportunities that it offers for our students, their families, their schools, and their communities. We hope you'll download the free Geocaching app, or check out the Geocaching website, and go find them all once they're live!
You may know that Urban Adventure Squad won this grant for the first time in 2018, for a project called "DC's Hidden Waterways." Our final field trip for that grant took place in May, when we took almost 50 5th graders from Stokes School on a boat ride on the Anacostia River with Anacostia Riverkeeper, conducted a litter cleanup in Anacostia Park, and visited the wonderful Aquatic Resources Education Center. It capped a school year full of hands-on, outdoors-focused learning for kindergarten through 5th grades.
Mayor's Office/United Way grant. UAS was also awarded a $25,000 Learn24 grant from D.C. Mayor Muriel's Bowser's Office of Out of School Time Grants and Youth Outcomes, which falls under the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education, and United Way.
The grant is funding a set of 15 free programs in Ward 7, at the East End campus of Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School. Programs take place on days when schools are closed, and on certain Fridays, after school closes at 1:00.
Families are thrilled to have a free, high-quality program for their children that is located at their school. WE are thrilled about that, and about the opportunity to explore the neighborhood, which includes Watts Branch, a tributary of the Anacostia River, the musically themed Watts Branch playground, which is connected to the Marvin Gaye Recreation Center, and East Capitol Urban Farm.
PROGRAMMING AND SCHOOL PARTNERSHIPS. In 2019, we planned 80 full days of school-year and summer programs for kindergarten through 8th grades, to help working families with all of those gap days. Schools are closed for about 30 days between September and June, which poses financial and logistical stress for parents with full-time jobs.
We now open registration for the full school year in late summer, so that families have a predictable schedule for when schools are closed.
We had to cancel a few of our general program days due to underenrollment, but almost all of them went forward as planned. We watch our enrollment patterns carefully to ensure that we do not have to cancel and leave families in a lurch. For our programs to be sustainable, we aim for a minimum of 15 enrolled students.
We are offering aftercare as often as we can, and as we are able to at our partner community organizations. Squad programs take place at a network of churches, synagogues, schools, and other community organizations where space would otherwise go unused. These relationships are essential to our programs.
For school-year 20-21, we are looking at opportunities to move to areas where we don't currently hold programs. If you'd like to see the Squad in your community, please get in touch. Moving to a new community is challenging for us, especially when we don't have a network of families that would allow us to reach our minimum number of students (15) to run a program, so we'll ask for your support in helping us get there.
School partnerships. Through our school-based partnership programs, we bring curriculum-aligned programs to schools and bring children outdoors to learn. In 2019, we engaged hundreds of children in grades PK3 through 8 through these programs.
At Creative Minds International Public Charter School in Petworth, we ran garden education programs for PK3 through 8th grades. Middle School science classes have regular visits to the garden, where students learn about food and nutrition, environmental stewardship, where our food comes from, chemical reactions in the garden, stormwater runoff, and much more.
At DC Bilingual Public Charter School in Fort Totten, we ran Friday programming from 1:00-6:00 that supported and enriched the afterschool program, the Hive.
At Elsie Whitlow Stokes PCS in Brookland, we completed our grant-funded project, "D.C.'s Hidden Waterways," in June, and continue our “Geocaching D.C.'s Waterways” work in 2020.
Yes, we do work with DCPS schools! Many, many students in our full-day programs are from DCPS, but the opportunities we've had for school-based partnerships are with charters.
We would love to partner with your DCPS school if you see an opportunity for the Squad. Please get in touch: [email protected]
COMMUNITY EVENTS AND PRESENTATIONS. As often as we can, we participate in or organize community events.
In spring 2019, as we have for the previous two years, we brought our "D.C.'s Hidden Waterways" work to Bethesda Elementary School's STEM Night, where we had a set of demonstrations that focused on pervious, or permeable surfaces versus impervious ones, like asphalt pavement and concrete driveways. When water runs down hard surfaces, it carries pollutants with it and into storm drains, to our waterways.
The more children know about this process and how it affects our watershed, the better they are at protecting our waterways and thinking up innovative solutions to solve our pressing environmental problems.
In November, we organized a Squad Waterway Cleanup at 14th and Gallatin Streets, NE, where we cleaned up a tributary of the Anacostia River that sits on National Park Service land. What a day! Here is just some of what we picked up:
Plastic bags: 212
Plastic bottles: 31
Glass bottles: 10
Aluminum cans: 147
Styrofoam: 3
Paper: 8
Clothing/carpeting: 29
Straws: 17
Food packaging: 55
Watershed Partners Meeting. In September, UAS Founder/Executive Director Elana Mintz was a panelist at the DC Department of Energy and Environment's Watershed Partners Meeting. Elana spoke about the impact of our first grant, the 2018 Community Stormwater Solutions grant, which funded our DC's Hidden Waterways curriculum.
COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS AND GUEST EDUCATORS. In 2019, we were lucky to welcome phenomenal guest educators who visited us at our programs or hosted us at their businesses, nonprofits, or government agencies.
It's impossible to list them all--it would take up this whole report!--but we offer a small sampling here:
UAS STAFF AND VOLUNTEERS
We have a fantastic staff of educators who lead our programs across D.C. They are graduate students, undergraduate students, and teachers.
In 2019, we welcomed Ashley Turnbull of Howard University, Maia Banayan of American University, and Peter Merlo-Coyne of the University of Maryland, College Park.
Our staff also includes:
Brielle Brookins, Howard University
Laurel Clark, American University
Ebony McCovery, Howard University
Our regular volunteer staff includes:
Joel Huffman, Paul Coverdell Fellows Program, American University School of International Service
Our staff of program educators is led by UAS Director of Programming Christy Brock.
In an upcoming UAS Update, we'll focus solely on UAS staff, their work with the Squad, and the work they do in the world. They are a talented, dedicated group of people, and they are the heart of the Squad. We are privileged to have them with us.
Do you know someone who would be a fantastic fit for the Urban Adventure Squad? Please review and share our job description: www.urbanadventuresquad.org/job-opportunity
High school volunteer network. We now accept high school volunteers for our programs, and they can earn service learning hours for their work. The Squad is a great volunteer opportunity for high schoolers who love the outdoors, exploring the city, the woods, and our waterways, and working with younger children as an educator and caregiver. Interested high schoolers and their families can email [email protected].
UAS BOARD OF DIRECTORS
UAS is overseen by a Board of Directors that meets quarterly. In addition to Elana Mintz, the executive director, the Board includes:
Eric Glantz, Board Treasurer, a nonprofit auditing executive at Marcum LLC; Nathan Slusher, Board Secretary, director of career education and outreach in the American University Career Center; Catherine Brown, senior fellow and former vice president of Education Policy at the Center for American Progress, and former vice president of policy at Teach for America; Arati Karnik, family medicine physician in Philadelphia and clinical faculty at Chestnut Hill Family Practice’s Residency Program; and Amanda Ripley, contributing writer at the Atlantic, senior fellow at the Emerson Collective, and author of The Smartest Kids in the World--and How They Got That Way and The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes--and Why.
You can read more about our Board here.
DREAMS FOR OUR FUTURE
Sometimes we get so caught up in the daily whirlwind of running the Squad that it's a challenge to look forward and dream about our long-term plans. But it's essential! Because sometimes a long-held dream--like a charter bus trip to the Eastern Shore, to immerse ourselves in the life of Harriet Tubman, as we did with 55 Squad students in 2018, or a new registration system, as we purchased this year--becomes a reality if we keep working on it, together.
So here's what we're dreaming about these days:
We would love to have a permanent home for the Squad one day, particularly in a place that may be in need of a sustainable plan going forward. We think about churches or other religious institutions that may have underused space; a nonprofit or business with too much space that might be considering a partnership; or a school that is interested in a mutually supportive partnership.
We would love to have a network of trip sponsors who can support our adventures that are inaccessible by public transportation. Charter buses are expensive, and renting school buses has proven to be enormously complicated. But there is a network of trails, farms, and rich community history that is ripe for exploration just outside the District, and we'd love to take our Squad on occasional, longer adventures.
If you are interested in becoming a field trip sponsor, please contact us so we can talk about the possibility:
Elana Mintz, UAS Founder/Exec. Director, [email protected]
Christy Brock, UAS Director of Programming, [email protected]
We want to establish a permanent education outreach fund that would allow us to bring our outdoors-focused curricula to schools in underserved neighborhoods around the District. Every child deserves a high-quality, hands-on, outdoors-focused education, and the mobile Squad can bring it! What we lack is the funding to bring our programming, free of charge, to more schools that want us there.
We are still dreaming about a real-life Squadmobile! One day, we'd love to have a fuel-efficient vehicle that would function as a mobile storage space AND a mobile learning lab that we can take to programs, events, and use to create pop-up educational opportunities all over the city and the surrounding areas. We would also use it to experiment with bringing the UAS model to other local cities and towns that are rich in history and wonderful for hikes.
A mobile learning lab would allow us to venture out to share the Squad love and hike with students and families in Maryland and Virginia as we learn about local history, the environment, public transportation systems, architecture and design, the arts, and much more.
We want to write a book. We've spent almost seven years researching and delivering hundreds of unique, community-based programs that use the city as the classroom, and we have supported classroom teachers by aligning those programs with curriculum units to bring hands-on, outdoors-focused, joyful learning programs to schools and school communities across the Washington, D.C. area.
We have done this on a tight budget, by leveraging fantastic free and low-cost resources, and by partnering with experts in almost every elementary and middle school academic area.
We think our accumulated work holds value for students, teachers, school districts, and policymakers, and that there are lessons in our experiments for rethinking and revolutionizing the school day in ways that support students, teachers, and working families.
We dream of the funding and the time that would allow us to write a resource that supports the stakeholders who matter most.
ARE YOU STILL THERE?
If you've gotten this far, thank you for caring enough about the Squad to read about our adventures.
If you'd like to come visit and see how the Squad rolls, we'd love it! Please contact us to set up a time: [email protected]
We wish you a year full of peace, health, happiness, and wonderful adventures, in your communities and beyond.
Happy UAS 2020!
Click here to make a donation* to Urban Adventure Squad/Urban Learning and Teaching Center.
*Registered families can donate through your account; a link to the account log-in page is at www.urbanadventuresquad.org.
Follow your Squad on Twitter (@UrbanAdvSquad) and Facebook (@UrbanAdvSquad).
Sign up for this e-newsletter by joining our email list
Please note our email addresses and add them to your contacts:
General UAS inquiries: [email protected]
Elana Mintz, Executive Director: [email protected]
Christy Brock, Director of Programming: [email protected]
Phone number (voicemail only): 202-455-0390
Questions, concerns, or feedback? Email [email protected]
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Jan. 2, 2020
Hello, Squad Community! Many of you are back at school and work today, and we hope it's a peaceful adjustment. Some of you are with us at our first program of 2020! Today and tomorrow, we wrap our winter break programs with a Squad Whodunnit--the Case of the Polluted Waterways--and next week, we open registration for UAS Summer 2020 with an announcement through our UAS Update, the e-newsletter you're reading right now.
Each year, we share with you our accomplishments and challenges of the last year, and our dreams for the years to come. These annual reports are aimed at keeping you informed and encouraging you to stay engaged. It's not an exaggeration to say that we would not be us (UAS!) without you. Why? Because...
You send us your ideas--sometimes by text, late at night, when you're feeling inspired by an idea for the Squad.
You tell friends, families, colleagues, and the administration at your schools about us, and that has led to many wonderful partnerships and programs.
You connect us with people who you think would be a great guest educator or field trip host for our students.
You write us emails about when your child shared something she learned at the Squad, or tell us about a hike you took because you read about it right here, in the UAS Update.
You donate what you can, when you can, because you believe in what we're building.
2019 HIGHLIGHTS
We have had some wonderful highlights in 2019--new program educators, new grants and opportunities, a new registration system--and some significant challenges: funding that comes with a heavy load of compliance and reporting, insufficient funds to support the communities that we want and need to serve, and the daily struggle--a familiar one for small nonprofits--of balancing the immediate work of running our programs with long-term development and strategic work that is critical to keeping us growing AND sustainable.
Here is what 2019 looked like for the Squad. Do you have questions, concerns, or ideas? Would you like to visit our programs? Please get in touch with us:
General UAS inquiries: [email protected]
Elana Mintz, Executive Director: [email protected]
Christy Brock, Director of Programming: [email protected]
Phone number (voicemail only): 202-455-0390
A SQUAD DREAM BECOMES A REALITY. At the start of the 2019-20 school year, we opened registration for our school-year programs using a new registration database powered by a company called UltraCamp.
A new database may not seem glamorous, but for an organization like ours, with just two full-time employees and a network of part-time employees who help as they can, reducing our administrative burden to free up more time for programming and development work is critical.
We built our registration system in 2015 using the website builder Weebly, and although the price was right--we purchased a yearlong business plan for just $300--the manual work of preparing and updating registrations and rosters was not.
We talk a lot about how essential your donations are, and how every dollar matters. A large, early-2019 donation of $5000 allowed us to consider purchasing a new system and investing the time to implement it. The system will pay for itself because of the amount of time we are saving, every day, by automating many of our old processes, but these investments require research, patience, and new funding.
We still have a lot to learn, but the best news (we hope!), is for our Squad families. The system allows them to log in, create profiles for all members of the family, make and cancel reservations, change authorized pickups, and more.
Since September, over 225 families have set up accounts in our system, and as we prepare to open registration for UAS Summer 2020, those numbers are ticking up.
Eventually, we'd like to use this system so that everyone in our Squad community can register for programs, classes, and community events for all ages.
TWO NEW GRANTS! In 2019, UAS was awarded two new grants. One, from the DC Department of Energy and Environment, is for $20,000 and supports our project that will use Geocaching--a global scavenger hunt that we use as a teaching tool at the Squad to learn about history, architecture, the environment, and much more--to educate the public and raise awareness about stormwater runoff, its effects on the pollution of the Anacostia River, and how to mitigate it.
The project, called "Geocaching D.C.'s Waterways," is funding our work with local schools and communities through school partnerships, and through our full-day programs when schools are closed, to create a series of 5-6 geocaches that are the result of student research, urban hiking, and advocacy. Our partner schools are:
- DC Bilingual Public Charter School
- Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School (Brookland Campus and East End Campus)
- Creative Minds International Public Charter School
We are visiting each of these schools during the 2019-20 academic year to work with students in classrooms and in their communities to research local environmental challenges and improvements, and to look for potential hiding places for our geocaches. We will work with students at our full-day, out-of-school-time programs that are located near the National Arboretum.
We are incredibly excited about this grant award, and the opportunities that it offers for our students, their families, their schools, and their communities. We hope you'll download the free Geocaching app, or check out the Geocaching website, and go find them all once they're live!
You may know that Urban Adventure Squad won this grant for the first time in 2018, for a project called "DC's Hidden Waterways." Our final field trip for that grant took place in May, when we took almost 50 5th graders from Stokes School on a boat ride on the Anacostia River with Anacostia Riverkeeper, conducted a litter cleanup in Anacostia Park, and visited the wonderful Aquatic Resources Education Center. It capped a school year full of hands-on, outdoors-focused learning for kindergarten through 5th grades.
Mayor's Office/United Way grant. UAS was also awarded a $25,000 Learn24 grant from D.C. Mayor Muriel's Bowser's Office of Out of School Time Grants and Youth Outcomes, which falls under the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education, and United Way.
The grant is funding a set of 15 free programs in Ward 7, at the East End campus of Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School. Programs take place on days when schools are closed, and on certain Fridays, after school closes at 1:00.
Families are thrilled to have a free, high-quality program for their children that is located at their school. WE are thrilled about that, and about the opportunity to explore the neighborhood, which includes Watts Branch, a tributary of the Anacostia River, the musically themed Watts Branch playground, which is connected to the Marvin Gaye Recreation Center, and East Capitol Urban Farm.
PROGRAMMING AND SCHOOL PARTNERSHIPS. In 2019, we planned 80 full days of school-year and summer programs for kindergarten through 8th grades, to help working families with all of those gap days. Schools are closed for about 30 days between September and June, which poses financial and logistical stress for parents with full-time jobs.
We now open registration for the full school year in late summer, so that families have a predictable schedule for when schools are closed.
We had to cancel a few of our general program days due to underenrollment, but almost all of them went forward as planned. We watch our enrollment patterns carefully to ensure that we do not have to cancel and leave families in a lurch. For our programs to be sustainable, we aim for a minimum of 15 enrolled students.
We are offering aftercare as often as we can, and as we are able to at our partner community organizations. Squad programs take place at a network of churches, synagogues, schools, and other community organizations where space would otherwise go unused. These relationships are essential to our programs.
For school-year 20-21, we are looking at opportunities to move to areas where we don't currently hold programs. If you'd like to see the Squad in your community, please get in touch. Moving to a new community is challenging for us, especially when we don't have a network of families that would allow us to reach our minimum number of students (15) to run a program, so we'll ask for your support in helping us get there.
School partnerships. Through our school-based partnership programs, we bring curriculum-aligned programs to schools and bring children outdoors to learn. In 2019, we engaged hundreds of children in grades PK3 through 8 through these programs.
At Creative Minds International Public Charter School in Petworth, we ran garden education programs for PK3 through 8th grades. Middle School science classes have regular visits to the garden, where students learn about food and nutrition, environmental stewardship, where our food comes from, chemical reactions in the garden, stormwater runoff, and much more.
At DC Bilingual Public Charter School in Fort Totten, we ran Friday programming from 1:00-6:00 that supported and enriched the afterschool program, the Hive.
At Elsie Whitlow Stokes PCS in Brookland, we completed our grant-funded project, "D.C.'s Hidden Waterways," in June, and continue our “Geocaching D.C.'s Waterways” work in 2020.
Yes, we do work with DCPS schools! Many, many students in our full-day programs are from DCPS, but the opportunities we've had for school-based partnerships are with charters.
We would love to partner with your DCPS school if you see an opportunity for the Squad. Please get in touch: [email protected]
COMMUNITY EVENTS AND PRESENTATIONS. As often as we can, we participate in or organize community events.
In spring 2019, as we have for the previous two years, we brought our "D.C.'s Hidden Waterways" work to Bethesda Elementary School's STEM Night, where we had a set of demonstrations that focused on pervious, or permeable surfaces versus impervious ones, like asphalt pavement and concrete driveways. When water runs down hard surfaces, it carries pollutants with it and into storm drains, to our waterways.
The more children know about this process and how it affects our watershed, the better they are at protecting our waterways and thinking up innovative solutions to solve our pressing environmental problems.
In November, we organized a Squad Waterway Cleanup at 14th and Gallatin Streets, NE, where we cleaned up a tributary of the Anacostia River that sits on National Park Service land. What a day! Here is just some of what we picked up:
Plastic bags: 212
Plastic bottles: 31
Glass bottles: 10
Aluminum cans: 147
Styrofoam: 3
Paper: 8
Clothing/carpeting: 29
Straws: 17
Food packaging: 55
Watershed Partners Meeting. In September, UAS Founder/Executive Director Elana Mintz was a panelist at the DC Department of Energy and Environment's Watershed Partners Meeting. Elana spoke about the impact of our first grant, the 2018 Community Stormwater Solutions grant, which funded our DC's Hidden Waterways curriculum.
COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS AND GUEST EDUCATORS. In 2019, we were lucky to welcome phenomenal guest educators who visited us at our programs or hosted us at their businesses, nonprofits, or government agencies.
It's impossible to list them all--it would take up this whole report!--but we offer a small sampling here:
- We visited the National Museum of Natural History, where we were hosted by bat experts Andrea Eller and Nicole Edmison.
- We had a visit from bat experts Lindsay Rohrbaugh and Catherine Fox of the DC Department of Energy and Environment.
- We had a tree lesson on the Gallaudet campus with Dana Gresham of Casey Trees.
- We had a lesson from Jenn Porter-Lupu, PhD candidate in anthropology, on archaeology, gender, and LGBTQ+ representation through history, as part of our Hidden History week.
- We visited the DC Department of Transportation and rode our own Circulator for the round trip!
- We had an art lesson from Charlie Visconage, a DC-based, self-taught artist.
- We learned to make pizza dough with Ruth Gresser, founder and owner of Pizzeria Paradiso.
- We had hands-on baking lessons with pastry chefs Cecile Mouthon of Breadfurst and Mercedes Amieva of Chez Billy Sud.
- We had a storytelling workshop--while we hiked through the woods!--with author, professor, and storyteller Sufian Zhemukhov.
- We identified and presented solutions for traffic and infrastructure problems in a showcase that included special guests from the DC Office of Planning and WDG Architecture.
UAS STAFF AND VOLUNTEERS
We have a fantastic staff of educators who lead our programs across D.C. They are graduate students, undergraduate students, and teachers.
In 2019, we welcomed Ashley Turnbull of Howard University, Maia Banayan of American University, and Peter Merlo-Coyne of the University of Maryland, College Park.
Our staff also includes:
Brielle Brookins, Howard University
Laurel Clark, American University
Ebony McCovery, Howard University
Our regular volunteer staff includes:
Joel Huffman, Paul Coverdell Fellows Program, American University School of International Service
Our staff of program educators is led by UAS Director of Programming Christy Brock.
In an upcoming UAS Update, we'll focus solely on UAS staff, their work with the Squad, and the work they do in the world. They are a talented, dedicated group of people, and they are the heart of the Squad. We are privileged to have them with us.
Do you know someone who would be a fantastic fit for the Urban Adventure Squad? Please review and share our job description: www.urbanadventuresquad.org/job-opportunity
High school volunteer network. We now accept high school volunteers for our programs, and they can earn service learning hours for their work. The Squad is a great volunteer opportunity for high schoolers who love the outdoors, exploring the city, the woods, and our waterways, and working with younger children as an educator and caregiver. Interested high schoolers and their families can email [email protected].
UAS BOARD OF DIRECTORS
UAS is overseen by a Board of Directors that meets quarterly. In addition to Elana Mintz, the executive director, the Board includes:
Eric Glantz, Board Treasurer, a nonprofit auditing executive at Marcum LLC; Nathan Slusher, Board Secretary, director of career education and outreach in the American University Career Center; Catherine Brown, senior fellow and former vice president of Education Policy at the Center for American Progress, and former vice president of policy at Teach for America; Arati Karnik, family medicine physician in Philadelphia and clinical faculty at Chestnut Hill Family Practice’s Residency Program; and Amanda Ripley, contributing writer at the Atlantic, senior fellow at the Emerson Collective, and author of The Smartest Kids in the World--and How They Got That Way and The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes--and Why.
You can read more about our Board here.
DREAMS FOR OUR FUTURE
Sometimes we get so caught up in the daily whirlwind of running the Squad that it's a challenge to look forward and dream about our long-term plans. But it's essential! Because sometimes a long-held dream--like a charter bus trip to the Eastern Shore, to immerse ourselves in the life of Harriet Tubman, as we did with 55 Squad students in 2018, or a new registration system, as we purchased this year--becomes a reality if we keep working on it, together.
So here's what we're dreaming about these days:
We would love to have a permanent home for the Squad one day, particularly in a place that may be in need of a sustainable plan going forward. We think about churches or other religious institutions that may have underused space; a nonprofit or business with too much space that might be considering a partnership; or a school that is interested in a mutually supportive partnership.
We would love to have a network of trip sponsors who can support our adventures that are inaccessible by public transportation. Charter buses are expensive, and renting school buses has proven to be enormously complicated. But there is a network of trails, farms, and rich community history that is ripe for exploration just outside the District, and we'd love to take our Squad on occasional, longer adventures.
If you are interested in becoming a field trip sponsor, please contact us so we can talk about the possibility:
Elana Mintz, UAS Founder/Exec. Director, [email protected]
Christy Brock, UAS Director of Programming, [email protected]
We want to establish a permanent education outreach fund that would allow us to bring our outdoors-focused curricula to schools in underserved neighborhoods around the District. Every child deserves a high-quality, hands-on, outdoors-focused education, and the mobile Squad can bring it! What we lack is the funding to bring our programming, free of charge, to more schools that want us there.
We are still dreaming about a real-life Squadmobile! One day, we'd love to have a fuel-efficient vehicle that would function as a mobile storage space AND a mobile learning lab that we can take to programs, events, and use to create pop-up educational opportunities all over the city and the surrounding areas. We would also use it to experiment with bringing the UAS model to other local cities and towns that are rich in history and wonderful for hikes.
A mobile learning lab would allow us to venture out to share the Squad love and hike with students and families in Maryland and Virginia as we learn about local history, the environment, public transportation systems, architecture and design, the arts, and much more.
We want to write a book. We've spent almost seven years researching and delivering hundreds of unique, community-based programs that use the city as the classroom, and we have supported classroom teachers by aligning those programs with curriculum units to bring hands-on, outdoors-focused, joyful learning programs to schools and school communities across the Washington, D.C. area.
We have done this on a tight budget, by leveraging fantastic free and low-cost resources, and by partnering with experts in almost every elementary and middle school academic area.
We think our accumulated work holds value for students, teachers, school districts, and policymakers, and that there are lessons in our experiments for rethinking and revolutionizing the school day in ways that support students, teachers, and working families.
We dream of the funding and the time that would allow us to write a resource that supports the stakeholders who matter most.
ARE YOU STILL THERE?
If you've gotten this far, thank you for caring enough about the Squad to read about our adventures.
If you'd like to come visit and see how the Squad rolls, we'd love it! Please contact us to set up a time: [email protected]
We wish you a year full of peace, health, happiness, and wonderful adventures, in your communities and beyond.
Happy UAS 2020!
Click here to make a donation* to Urban Adventure Squad/Urban Learning and Teaching Center.
*Registered families can donate through your account; a link to the account log-in page is at www.urbanadventuresquad.org.
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Please note our email addresses and add them to your contacts:
General UAS inquiries: [email protected]
Elana Mintz, Executive Director: [email protected]
Christy Brock, Director of Programming: [email protected]
Phone number (voicemail only): 202-455-0390
Questions, concerns, or feedback? Email [email protected]
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