When a nature center and all its components are well designed, they help you achieve your goals and objectives. When they aren’t, they sometimes get in the way of the work you are trying to achieve. Because so much of the work I do involves designing new nature centers or… read more →
I like to learn about nature centers by reading their reviews on TripAdvisor, Yelp, and similar websites. There are praising remarks and critical ones, but nothing says “Kiss of Death” like a review that describes a center as “______’s best-kept secret.” The reviewers may consider “best-kept secret” to be a… read more →
Let me return (finally!) to the topic I launched in my post of November 4. Every nature center makes investments, and presumably every nature center seeks some sort of return. As I wrote several months ago, that return is unique to your organization, and you (or your management, or your… read more →
The more I read the research about what leads people to become motivated conservationists, the more I believe that the most important work nature centers do is with the very young—pre-reading age children who are still filled with a sense of wonder, and who are forming the affinities and emotional… read more →
One of the perks of working at most nature centers and similar places is that you get, at least occasionally, packets of hand-illustrated thank you notes from school children who have visited. One of the ones I remember best was addressed to an educator on my staff, displaying a portrait… read more →
I’ll admit it—I’m one of those people who sees things as they are, and says “Why?” And frankly, I wish I’d started doing it sooner. It’s a question I don’t think gets asked often enough at nature centers. There are lots of people in our profession who ask, “Why not?”… read more →
“The nature center is a new idea,” wrote Byron Ashbaugh in his National Audubon Society bulletin Planning a Nature Center. The year was 1963. The Audubon Center in Greenwich (CT) had opened in 1942—it’s the oldest nature center I can find. (Anybody know of an older one?) Other centers I… read more →
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