The Hitchcock Center for the Environment honored Northampton High School students: Adia Bennett, Saraphina Forman, Willa Sippel, and Jordan Winsor with its Heroes for a Healthy Planet Award at its […]
By Sadie Ross
Frontier Regional School
This year, the Frontier Environmental Club, composed of 8th and 9th graders, decided to take steps creating change in the school. We hope that this will lead to further changes and inspire other schools to follow suit. This year, it all started for us when we attended the Western Mass Youth Climate Summit. This is an educational, 2-day conference that allows students who are passionate about the environment, to create an action plan to carry out through the rest of the school year.
By Angelina Egland and Cheryl Moreau
Frontier Regional School
When we were at the Summit in November, 2018, we were excited to participate in the high school idea to reduce the school’s electricity usage at the middle school level. Our high school and middle school are combined. We were the ones to set up the timers for the middle school Chromebooks and we became the liaisons for the middle school teachers and their implementation so the eco-tools would be used correctly.
Hitchcock Center’s Small Wonders: Using Science and Nature to Grow Young Minds project engaged over 200 early childhood educators during the 2018-19 school year, to increase the integration of science and nature into early childhood programs and schools throughout the Pioneer Valley.
By Jessica Schultz
The Hitchcock Center has partnered with Mount Holyoke College to provide core science curriculum training for Masters of Arts in Teaching (MAT) pre-service teachers. The program, taught by Education Director Colleen Kelley, has run for 5 weeks at the Hitchcock Center this fall.
The Elizabeth Farnsworth Native Fern Garden and Fern Cobble were unveiled and dedicated at the Hitchcock Center on August 8, 2019 by a cohort of Elizabeth’s long-time friends and colleagues. The garden and cobble nearly 30 of the 58 native ferns species in New England, tucked along the shady northern edge of the Center’s pathway to the Den Play area and trails beyond.
Hitchcock Center’s Living Building Coordinator Jessica Schultz and architect Sam Batchelor of designLAB architects were featured on the Build Better podcast. In this segment, Jessica and Sam talk about what it means to build a Living Building, how the building can be design to be a teaching tool, and how we use the building to promote environmental and social change.
By Katie Koerten and Peter Lamdin
The Hitchcock Center’s Leadership Training Camp (LTC) just had its sixth summer. Created in 2014, its mission is to grow leadership skills in an immersive outdoor setting. The result has been six years of campers who are increasingly comfortable taking risks in the outdoors and providing their peers with constructive leadership feedback. One of Hitchcock’s most popular summer camp programs, LTC feels like it gets better each year. Much of its strength and success comes from the campers themselves.
By Greta Jochem
In 2016, two “living buildings”— self-sufficient buildings that create more energy than they use and that collect their own water — were constructed in Amherst. Hampshire College’s R.W. Kern Center and the Hitchcock Center for the Environment are among the first buildings in the world to achieve the “living building” certification. But part of what makes a building seem full of life is the people behind it — and that’s the focus of a new book by Jonathan Wright, a 1974 Hampshire College graduate and senior adviser of Northampton-based Wright Builders, the contractor who constructed the buildings.
In Episode #11 of the Build Better podcast, Anastasia chats with Sam Batchelor of designLAB Architects and Jessica Schultz of the Hitchcock Center for the Environment to discuss the Hitchcock Center’s recent global recognition as the 23rd living building in the world and the 4th in Massachusetts. They detail how the Hitchcock Center achieved the certification and how they are both educating people on the importance of building sustainably.
Hitchcock Center for the Environment
at Hampshire College
845 West Street | Amherst MA 01002 | 413.256.6006 | 413.253.2809 fax