Educating Kids about Population

By Pam Wasserman, Vice President for Education

As part of Population Connection's mission, we work with teachers nationwide to incorporate population education into their classroom instruction. In 2008, we held 524 workshops for over 11,000 teachers and future teachers in 36 states and 2 Canadian provinces. At these workshops, educators learn about the impacts of human population pressures and the best ways to address these issues with different age groups. Each workshop features a variety of hands-on activities. Based on past evaluation surveys, we estimate that educators trained in our 2008 workshops will allow us to reach an additional 800,000 students each year.

Our staff of trainers is small, but we have a wonderful corps of volunteer trainers around the country who present these workshops in their local areas. This group includes university educators, K-12 teachers and nonformal educators who feel passionate about Population Connection curricula and want to share it with others. Last year, their in-kind contribution of time was over $240,000!

We greatly expanded our outreach in California last year after conducting a "train-the-trainers" Institute for 30 new workshop facilitators in San Francisco, and hope to replicate this in other areas of the country as funding allows.

One of our great achievements of the year was completing a new edition of our high school curriculum, Earth Matters: Studies for Our Global Future on CD-ROM. Read more about it at populationeducation.org.