Directory of Federal Grant-making
Programs for Environmentally-related Education

INTRODUCTION

Purpose:

The Directory of Federal Grant-making Programs for Environmentally-related Education is designed to help meet the need of the environmental education community for easily accessible and reasonably comprehensive information about federal funding programs. It also helps enable the Campaign for Environmental Literacy to track and analyze government grant-making trends, and to provide this information to Members of Congress.

Overview:

The federal government supports environmentally-related education in essentially three ways. First, it provides scholarships, fellowships, internships and other such programs that fund or support individuals to further their education and training in environmentally-related fields. While this support is important, it is not included in this directory. Second, many agencies conduct their own environmentally-related education programs (some even estimate that more federal funds are spent on such in-house programs than on extramural grantmaking). While it is important to document and track these programs, this too is beyond the scope of this project. And third, it engages in extramural grant-making, the focus of this Directory.

Limitations:

However, assembling comprehensive information on federal environmentally-related education (EE) grantmaking programs is challenging for at least three reasons:

First, environmentally education is sufficiently complex and wide-ranging to extend beyond the mission, resources, and expertise of any single agency, instead cutting across a wide range of federal agencies which have identified EE as important to their agency mission [1]. Thus the decentralized nature of federal EE programs creates significant barriers to analyzing the federal EE portfolio. At no time in the Congressional authorization or appropriations process is the EE grant-making portfolio examined as a whole, across the federal government. (And there are numerous impediments to coordination and informed priority setting across the federal government as well.)

Second, the vast majority of possible funding sources do not focus their programs primarily on EE. For example, EE organizations have successfully tapped funding programs at the Department of Defense and the National Institute of Environmental Health Science, and numerous other seemingly unlikely sources. 

Third, the limits of the broad field of environmentally-related education are difficult to sharply delineate.  This Directory has chosen to define environmentally-related education as all forms of formal and informal education that seek to advance understanding of the various biological and physical components of the earth's environment and the interactions between the earth's environment and humankind.

The following areas are included in the definition of environmentally-related education:

• All sectors (undergraduate, graduate, training and career development, professional development, k-12, informal)
• Environmental, conservation, sustainability, ocean/marine, energy, geography, outdoor, earth, agricultural, wildlife, atmospheric/climate, geology, oceanography, environmental biology, forestry, environmental engineering, resource management, and environmental economics education.  

The following areas are not included in the definition of environmentally-related education:

• Research and development
• Public information
• Most human health education programs unless focused on environmental health education
• Extraterrestrial environmental education such as education about the atmospheres and geologies of other planets.