City Green Teaches Teachers as Part of the New Jersey Climate Change Learning Collaborative!

Last year, City Green was awarded a grant from the Ramapo College of New Jersey’s Climate Change Learning Collaborative (CCLC) that operates in partnership with the New Jersey Department of Education. The Climate Change Learning Collaborative was established by the NJ Department of Education in 2024 to advance high-quality climate change education within NJ’s schools. Through partnerships with organizations like City Green, the CCLC enabled us to provide local New Jersey public schools with free professional development, technical assistance, experiential learning opportunities, and networking opportunities for teachers to advance the subject of climate change education.

As a professional development partner in this program, City Green designed and hosted workshops with local schoolteachers that focus on regenerative and sustainable growing practices that teachers can employ in their school gardens. Led by City Green’s team of educators, the workshops demonstrated to teachers how to apply sustainable school gardening practices, such as those used at the Farm Eco-Center, in a smaller school garden setting.

School gardens are powerful instruments for students to explore food and our environment! Through City Green’s partnership with the Climate Education Learning Collaborative, local teachers can deepen the impact of their school gardens by bringing new lessons and tools that promote climate resilience back to their students. For example, teachers from the Montclair Co-Op used seed garlic from the Climate Resiliency workshop to pair 5th and 6th-grade students with 1st graders to plant garlic in their school garden. This reinforces climate resiliency learning for older students while giving young students friends and mentors from within the student body. And at our Soil & Composting workshop, teachers from different schools networked and shared soil samples from each other’s gardens. Students at these schools were then able to compare soils from various local school gardens, expanding their understanding of the differences between types of soil. 

In total, sixty-seven teachers from twenty-five schools in Paterson, Jersey City, Carlstadt, Closter, Fair Lawn, Montclair, and other areas learned and connected at the three professional development workshops. Learn more about the New Jersey Department of Education's Climate Change Learning Collaboratives here. Read here about how Ramapo University of New Jersey is operating its regional CCLC in the northern New Jersey counties of Passaic, Morris, Hudson, Bergen, and Essex with partners like City Green.