Environmental Awareness Academy Inc

🌿Stewardship Made Simple🌿

We invite you to take simple, positive action in preserving one of South Florida’s rare ecological treasures—Cox Hammock, located in the Redland agricultural area of Miami-Dade County. Through the leadership of the Environmental Awareness Academy's Forest Keepers Program and funding from the FIU School of Environment, Arts, and Society, we’ve already begun the vital work of reclaiming this endemic forest from the grip of invasive species like jasmine vine and air potato, which threaten the biodiversity and integrity of the hammock.  This rare ecosystem, rich with native species found nowhere else, has been under threat from relentless invasive plants that have built up for more than 50 years. Jasmine vine and air potato have strangled native vegetation, disrupted wildlife habitat, and threatened to erase this natural legacy.

Over the past several months, EAA’s Forest Keeper’s crew has cleared 3.5 acres of dense invasive overgrowth, allowing native tropical hardwood trees and critical wildlife habitat to begin recovering. However, the work is far from finished. With 26.55 additional acres covered in invasives, mainly jasmine vine, we need long-term removal and monitoring to ensure this ecosystem’s survival. We need your help.

We are seeking to raise $15,000 to help fund the goals of the next phase of this project:

• Expand invasive species removal and seed bank suppression work
• Expand public outreach and community biodiversity education 

We welcome your financial stewardship support and your commitment to preserving the past—and protecting our natural future.

🌿 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 have added several new schools to the schedule, and EAA is working with the GEN2050 Initiative to fill the need for STEAM education in Miami-Dade public and private schools.  Additionally, EAA hosts GEN2050 summer camp students at varying locations 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. 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.  Last year we were able to provide hands-on bee keeper training for eleven youth.  Ricardo Diaz from 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.