Outdoor Leadership Trainings for South Bay Educators and Families

The Authority helped to fund Living Classroom’s partnership with Campbell Unified School District to implement their new Environmental Literacy Initiative called "Champions for Change.” This project focuses on designing, installing, and maintaining new and enhanced edible and native habitat gardens on all Campbell Unified School District campuses and providing garden-based lessons across all grade levels with the aim of connecting students to nature and the sources of their food and graduating environmentally literate students by 8th grade.

The Authority will help fund BioBlitz events which will allow people to learn about the diverse natural areas with varied wildlife along Coyote Creek and other South Bay parks. Throughout the ten BioBlitz events, naturalists will lead participants, some who may have spent little time in nature, to use iNaturalist, a mobile app, to document biodiversity. These events will continue to expose people to the outdoors in a new way. The four virtual BioBlitzes that will be offered will allow people to learn about local nature in-depth from naturalists and participate remotely

The Authority contributed funds to the Santa Clara County Food System Alliance project which addresses the issue of economic and social viability of small-scale urban and peri-urban agricultural operations in Santa Clara County. The Alliance will produce a report that highlights potential models for creating successful small-scale agricultural operations and identifies marketing and distribution systems that expand healthy food access by linking a viable urban and peri-urban agricultural system to residents of Santa Clara County, particularly underserved communities. The report will also provide recommendations illustrating how to implement potentially successful models in the county. The data and recommendations in the report will be useful for policymakers, elected officials, partner organizations, beginning and existing small farmers, and they will feed into the Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation Strategy process and Urban Agriculture Incentive Zone implementation.