10 Ways NWF Has Helped Your Children

This year, NWF celebrates the 75th anniversary of its founding as a coalition of conservation groups seeking to make the nation safer for wildlife and wild places. NWF focused early on the need to educate America’s future generations about conservation. In 1941, the Federation published a series of education booklets for primary school students, and the following year published The Foundations of Conservation Education, a book outlining the challenges of teaching children about resource issues.

The Federation has continued this educational tradition down to the present. Here are 10 ways in which NWF during the past two decades has been ensuring that your children have the chance to learn about nature and how to make a difference in meeting the goals of conservation:

  • 1990: NWF launched the “Cool It” project on college campuses across the country, urging students and administrators to take action to combat global warming.
  • 1994: The Federation initiated Earth Tomorrow, an environmental education program aimed at urban teenagers.
  • 1995: The Federation secured funding to send low-income children to summer wildlife camps.
  • 1995: NWF launched its first website.
  • 1996: The Federation broadcast a live satellite TV show about the importance of wetlands to thousands of classrooms nationwide.
  • 2006: The NWF Campus Ecology program initiated a campaign to show colleges how to reduce their global warming pollution.
  • 2008: NWF’s longest running education program, National Wildlife Week, celebrated its 70th year by focusing on getting people outdoors.
  • 2008: The Campus Ecology program issued a report showing how universities that step up efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions reap financial rewards—one of several NWF studies released during the year that detail the effects of climate change on people and wildlife.
  • 2009: The Federation initiated its Be Out There campaign to encourage parents and youngsters to get outdoors.
  • 2009: NWF became the host and driving force behind Eco-Schools USA, part of a network of 37,000 schools in 50 nations seeking to guide students toward environmental stewardship.

The high quality of such efforts has won the Federation a good deal of recognition. In 2000, Smart Money magazine named NWF the nation’s best environmental group for responsibly spending its members’ donations.  Two years ago, the nonprofit Alliance for Workplace Excellence honored NWF as a “visionary employer that is paving the way for environmentally sustainable workplaces.”

To find out the many other ways that NWF has helped to educate Americans and to protect the nation’s wildlife, check out our interactive timeline of notable moments and accomplishments from our first 75 years.