TOTAL NM (Teaching Outdoors to ALL Learners), FS Valencia Community Gardens

VISION: TOTAL NM (Teaching Outdoors To ALL Learners) New Mexico is founded on the transformative idea that inclusive, accessible, and equitable outdoor spaces can benefit the educational experience for all students of all abilities and backgrounds. MISSION: We support equitable outdoor learning spaces for all prek-12th grade NM students by providing spaces for relationship building, professional development, and resource sharing. Areas of Focus: TOTAL NM will foster equitable outdoor classrooms and spaces for all students by: Fostering collaborative spaces for organizations, youth, teachers, and educators Providing professional development and collaboration for formal and informal educators Advocating for funding, legislative and policy efforts that support outdoor classrooms and spaces Promoting recommendations from the community-generated vision and strategy Every Kid, Every Day, Every Way TOTAL NM is a startup nonprofit – launched September 2023, created to address the above areas of focus. To address these goals, TOTAL NM is seeking to create an Outdoor Educator Leadership Institute Program in Valencia County. The TOTAL NM leadership team brings over five decades of New Mexico-specific outdoor learning experience working directly with youth and including collaborations across New Mexico specifically addressing systemic barriers to equitable outdoor learning. Here is what TOTAL NM has already done in its first month: To kickstart the first initiatives to do this critical work, TOTAL NM held a virtual community welcome event on October 4th, 2023 as a starting point to gather new ideas, goals, partnerships, and resources to get started for students and their teachers, educators and leaders from supporting organizations, policy makers, and others interested in outdoor learning from around the state. These ideas were implemented to assist in the development of the Outdoor Educator Leadership Institute Program. TOTAL NM attended the NAAEE (National American Association for Environmental Education) virtual conference October 17th-20th including several other professionals, affiliate organizations, and leaders in environmental education from across the globe. Here, we gained new insights, resources, relationships, and perspectives to realize the need for this type of program. TOTAL NM was invited to attend the Outdoor Economics Conference in late October which gave us a chance to network with several supporting organizations who found extreme value in our mission and vision and offered partnership opportunities for this type of program. TOTAL NM was personally invited to a reception on the first evening of the conference and received an interview to discuss the important initiative to grow outdoor classrooms in schoolyards.