Build capacity for programming in your community with EPA’s EnviroAtlas
Citation:
Hartley, J. Build capacity for programming in your community with EPA’s EnviroAtlas. North American Association for Environmental Education, Tuscon, Arizona, October 09 - 17, 2020.
Impact/Purpose:
US EPA’s EnviroAtlas can help environmental education (EE) centers easily find insight about their community members with hundreds of spatial data layers. One benefit of EnviroAtlas is that you can view population data in tandem with environmental and built environment data, helping you answer important questions to make your EE programs more meaningful to the communities you serve, such as “who lives in our communities?” and “what is their surrounding environment like?”
Description:
Now more than ever, it is essential for EE centers to cultivate programming that is inviting and accessible to all members of their communities. There is no such thing as a “typical” museum visitor, therefore designing programs for diverse audiences can be difficult. US EPA’s EnviroAtlas can help EE centers easily find insight about their community members with hundreds of spatial data layers. One benefit of EnviroAtlas is that you can view this population data in tandem with environmental and built environment data, helping you answer important questions to make your EE programs more meaningful to the communities you serve, such as “who lives in our communities?” and “what is their surrounding environment like?” Additionally, as practitioners of environmental education, you can think critically about how the lack or presence of nearby green or blue spaces might affect the daily lives of your visitors. EnviroAtlas is a free, web-based, interactive mapping application that is simple to use and puts data at the user’s fingertips in the form of easy-to-read maps. In the first half of this session, EE researcher and EPA ORISE participant, Jenna Hartley, will introduce ideas behind equitable EE programming for diverse audiences, and then introduce participants to EnviroAtlas. In the second half of the session, Jenna will lead participants through a hands-on activity in which they can easily build demographic maps specific to their location using their own laptops (internet is required). These dynamic maps can be easily displayed for others to help inform future programming and/or justify programming decisions to local funding groups, board members, or Program Directors. Participants will leave the session with stats, data, and maps in-hand to justify which groups they’re designing programs for and why. Data can be powerful – join the US EPA’s EnviroAtlas team as we use data to build capacity for delivering effective, relevant, and locally-based EE programs right in your own communities. This abstract has been reviewed and approved by the US Environmental Protection Agency.