Sprout up: Seeds for the future

One late April morning at PS 249 Elementary School in Brooklyn, NYU student Carly Cheriff talks animatedly about composting and ocean waste to a group of second graders on tiny chairs huddled around her. The day’s lesson plan includes a talk of landfills, trash circles and protection of the ocean environment.

Cheriff volunteers with an environmental organization called Sprout Up. First established in UC schools in California, Sprout Up aims to establish college-student-led environmental education programs in public elementary schools.

Sprout Up NYU, the first program chapter on the East Coast, is composed of passionate NYU students who teach first and second graders about environmentalism and sustainability for eight weeks every semester.

“Honestly, I think humans are screwing up the planet,” says Walter Wilson Hutcheson, chapter director of Sprout Up NYC, “It terrifies me.” Hutcheson brought the idea to the East Coast with the help of his girlfriend, Maddie Taylor, who spent a year teaching at Sprout Up UCSB last year. She said, “Sprout Up lessons were always the best part of my week, and I can’t wait to start doing it again.”

Sprout Up instructors believe that the organization will instill an environmental ethic in the next generation of students. “Even in a city like New York where there is no nature, it’s important to teach the children the nature of the farmer’s market they go to, or why they need to shut off the water after they brush their teeth,” says Catherine Dammer-Jones, a Sprout Up instructor and an environmental science major at NYU.

The organization employs interactive methods to incorporate fun activities with the environmental curriculum. In a typical 50-minute Sprout Up session, be it choosing between bio-degradable and non bio-degradable food items for their fake lunch or drawing in their nature journals about what they learned during the session, the children are kept constantly intrigued and excited. They even get to pick their nature names: Silver Wolf, Crescent Moon, White Shark, Volcano, Honey Badger 

The organization is still a small start-up that was established at the beginning of 2015. It has gathered a core group of passionate environmentalists, and has elicited interest among numerous college student groups. “Who doesn’t love teaching little kids about planting vegetables in their neighborhood?” asks Tessa Rosenberry, community manager and lead instructor of Sprout Up NYU. 

Hutcheson and Taylor, chapter directors at the only two Sprout Up schools on the east coast, envision expanding the program to include children from low-income schools that have low math and science scores, who don’t have access to such programs.

Fund-raising and recruitment events take place all over campus to generate more interest in the recently established start-up. “We want to develop a culture that makes it cool to be in Sprout Up,” Hutcheson says hopefully. “Maybe that’s just me romanticizing.”