A St. Louis nonprofit that provides nature-based education to city kids is losing almost a half-million dollars in federal funds.
The organization, Gateway to the Great Outdoors, was awarded more than $490,000 in grants from AmeriCorps that are getting cut. The largest grant totaled more than $430,000 and went into effect in September.
Late last month, the organization received an email from AmeriCorps saying the grants were being terminated because “the award no longer effectuates agency priorities.” The letter said this was a final decision and could not be appealed.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency ordered AmeriCorps to cut almost $400 million in grants, affecting programs across the country, according to the Washington Post. AmeriCorps did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Gateway to the Great Outdoors had hired additional staff to expand its programming with the promised funds. Now it has laid off 10 employees, or 70% of its team.
Nadav Sprague started the work that would become Gateway to the Great Outdoors in 2015 as a partner with Lift for Life Academy, a charter school near Soulard.
Every week, students would be taught “these fun environmental science lessons, really taking what they're learning in their textbooks and bringing it to life,” Sprague said of the early days of the program.
Sprague said that growing up in Chicago, he learned nature was often unavailable for city students and wanted to change that. In the 2016-17 school year, the organization became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Now, the program offers environmental education in classrooms and brings low-income, urban youth into nature on field trips. Its students come from St. Louis Public Schools, the Ferguson-Florissant School District and Chicago Public Schools. In 2023, St. Louis Public Schools named the organization its community partner of the year.
“It's not a controversial thing,” Sprague said. “We are providing high-quality, interactive outdoor science education to students in city public schools, and that's what we want to continue doing.”
Studies of the program have found it had a positive impact in diverse ways, said Christine Ekenga, an assistant professor of environmental health at Emory University who is also on the nonprofit's board of directors. Ekenga has evaluated Gateway to the Great Outdoors’ programming in multiple peer-reviewed studies.
“We found great benefits of nature-based education, particularly for these students,” Ekenga said. “We've seen improvements in academic performance. We've seen improvements in mental health and emotional well-being, so reductions in stress and anxiety. The activities that they participate in, they promote physical health, they promote social skills and collaboration.”
Ekenga's work found that many of the St. Louis students involved in the program were experiencing nature for the first time.
“We found that 50% of the students had never visited a zoo prior to the program, 20% of them had never been to an outdoor park, 45% of them had never visited a garden,” Ekenga said.
Sprague also said many of their trips are the first time city kids are seeing things like lakes and woods or sleeping away from home on camping trips.
“I remember having this really deep conversation with one of the students, and she really opened up to me, and she said, ‘GGO is the only time that I feel like I have my childhood,’” Sprague said.
Ekenga said she doesn’t know why the program would be targeted for a cut.
“I am having a little bit of trouble understanding the politics of providing additional educational experiences to children,” Ekenga said. “So it's a little perplexing. This is a program that is shown to be a benefit to the children.”
One of the grants is structured as a reimbursement, so Sprague said if the federal government does not honor that commitment, the organization will lose close to $70,000.
When the funds were first promised, Sprague was looking forward to expanding the program to reach more classrooms. Now, he said the organization is focused on surviving.
“We love St. Louis Public Schools. We love working in the St. Louis community,” he said. “We survived the COVID-19 pandemic. We're going to survive this, but we're really going to need our community's help.”
This story has been updated to include that Christine Ekenga is on the board of directors.
