Environmental Awareness Academy Inc

🌿Stewardship Made Simple🌿

Building on our past forest restoration work, and our collaborative work with the GEN2050 Youth Biodiversity Network, the Environmental Awareness Academy (EAA) Forest Keepers are striving to build a healthier community for future generations through direct environmental action. The EAA Forest Keepers are partnering with Florida Butterfly Botanicals to expand its environmental education efforts by engaging multigenerational households in Miami-Dade County to create biodiversity-friendly mini-ecosystems. According to the Miami Herald, 13% of all households in Miami-Dade County are multigenerational representing 86,053 grandparents having daily interactions with grandchildren. Recognizing that many local families include grandparents living with grandchildren, the program empowers older adults to become environmental mentors by learning about native plants, biodiversity monitoring, and habitat restoration. This knowledge is then passed down within the family, fostering environmental stewardship across generations while creating small, wildlife-friendly ecosystems in residential courtyards.

The initiative focuses on restoring habitat for South Florida's critically endangered pine rockland ecosystem by providing participating families with native plants, installation assistance, and ongoing "at home" educational support. Even small home landscapes planted with diverse native species can provide valuable habitat for pollinators, birds, and other wildlife while reconnecting urban communities with Florida's unique natural heritage. Participation is available through a brief application process, with enrollment based on available funding and program capacity.

🌿 Our History 🌿

The Environmental Awareness Academy seeks to empower youth around the world to be more resilient and self-sufficient through environmental education. This is accomplished through providing intensive, hands-on, outdoor science education, alongside classroom courses, with the goal of creating pathways to secondary education, college education, entrepreneurship, and economic stability for under-served youth. Since EAA's inception in 2019, our organization has worked in collaboration with the GEN2050 program across Miami-Dade County. Dr. Lisa Johns, EAA's South Florida Education Director, creates environmental curriculum and delivers instruction to several hundred students a week at Ojus Elementary, Norland Middle School, and Turner Tech.  This year we will continue to add new schools to the schedule, and EAA will continue to work with the GEN2050 Initiative to fill the need for STEAM education in Miami-Dade public and private schools. GEN2050 summer camp continues to host students at varying locations for outdoor la in south Dade.  In the past we have worked at Patch of Heaven Sanctuary, Lion Farms, DuMond Conservancy, Everglades National Park, LNB Farms, Trinity Church and Biscayne National Park.

Another one of our integral programs in south Florida, the EAA Forest Keepers, is a work/study program composed of non-traditional students. The current group are highly trained individuals with years of experience in the restoration of our south Florida endemic forests. These individuals spent many years restoring the forest and creating native habitats at Patch of Heaven Sanctuary, and now they have stepped up to take on the restoration of Cox Hammock. They regularly visit school sites here in Miami-Dade County to create compost facilities, pollinator gardens, and to assist in urban gardening projects with GEN2050. As the GEN2050 program grows, so too needs to grow the EAA Forest Keepers Program in order to provide support to all the school sites with much needed STEAM programming for students.

Finally, EAA also works with a select group of youth in Cantarranas, Honduras to provide long-term educational support. We provide basic school supplies, and environmental education opportunities that help students develop skills that make them less apt to migrate to other countries.  EAA has twenty four students that have been part of our programming since 2021. Our donors provide much needed educational supplies, yearly medical exams, transportation needs, and monthly environmental programs.  Past environmental opportunities allowed EAA to be able to provide hands-on bee keeper training for eleven youth.  Ricardo Diaz from Miel Trigona visited monthly and held hands-on classes to train students to work with Africanized honey bees. The program was a success, and we now have fifteen additional students waiting to join our programming.