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California RegionsNorth Coast: Northern Bay Area, North Coast and Northern Coast Ranges Including Marin, Sonoma, Napa, Lake, Mendocino, Humboldt and Del Norte Counties Northern Mountains and Valleys: Northern Sierra, Sacramento Valley, Cascades, Modoc Plateau, and Trinity-Klamath Region Including Mono, Alpine, Amador, Eldorado, Placer, Nevada, Sierra, Plumas, Lassen, Modoc, Siskiyou, Shasta, Trinity, Tehama, Butte, Yuba, Sutter, Glenn, Colusa, Yolo, Solano, and Sacramento Counties Central Coast: Southern Bay Area, Central Coast And Central Coast Ranges Including San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Contra Costa, Alameda, Santa Clara and San Benito Counties Central Mountains and Valleys: Southern Sierra, Eastern Sierra, and San Joaquin Valley Including Calaveras, Fresno, Inyo, Kern, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced, Mono, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Tulare, and Tuolumne Counties South Coast: Southern Coastal areas and Coastal Mountains and Cities Including Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego Counties Southern Mountains and Deserts: Southern California Mountains and Deserts and Inland Cities Including San Bernardino, Riverside and Imperial Counties Search for an EE Provider by name: About the EE Providers / How to get on the map! | Certifications | Note on the regions |
These wonderful programs provide environmental and outdoor education programs and are supporters of AEOE through their Institutional Memberships. Member programs have access to high quality professional development through AEOE Conferences and are connected to a larger network of environmental and outdoor educators in the state.
This map lists only AEOE Institutional Member Organizations (click the map to find one in your area, or see alphabetical list of member organizations). If you would like to have your program listed on this page, you must join AEOE as an Institutional Member.
Benefits of Institutional Membership include unlimited free job postings on the AEOE Joblist, free listing for your program on these California EE Providers pages, participation in conference job fairs, promotion of events at your program through the AEOE Calendar, and the AEOE quarterly newsletter (paper or electronic). Plus, you are supporting AEOE! Institutional membership is for organizations/programs only. It does not include individual memberships for the contact person or any of the staff of the program, who must join separately.
To join, print out the membership form and mail in to the AEOE membership coordinator (address on the form).
There are some programs with certification or accreditation listed. Click on the certification to see what it means.
COSA (California
Outdoor School Administrators) certifies California Public Residential Outdoor
Science School
(ROSS) programs for both
the site
and the
program's science content and correlations to the California State Science
Frameworks and Standards.
ACA (American Camp Association) accredits camps - summer camps, church camps, camps of
all kinds - and looks at similar standards for the site itself as COSA does
(facilities, food service, safety, emergency plans, etc), but different types
of instructional
standards since it is assessing different types of programs. Public school
owned camps generally do not seek ACA accreditation if they are not running
summer camps at their sites. Public school programs which rent sites that are
ACA accredited are likely to have both seals.
Only overnight programs are eligible for the above seals, so day programs, which may be educationally excellent, will not have them.
AEE (Association
for Experiential Education) AEE accredits adventure education programs. The
AEE accreditation process is a voluntary program of self-regulation sponsored
by
the Association
for
Experiential
Education
for organizational members. When
AEE accredits an adventure education program, we attest that on the dates of
the site visit, the program has an educational mission; clearly defined and appropriate
objectives, maintains conditions under which those objectives may be achieved,
and appears to be achieving them. An accreditation certificate informs potential
participants and others that programs are operating in a manner that is acceptable
to the industry.
Christian
Camp and Conference Association member.
I used ACA's and AEE's websites to determine which sites had accreditation,
and worked directly with COSA to find out which programs are currently certified.
if your site/program has a certification/accreditation that is
not
listed.
Note on the regions: I chose to delineate these regions based on several factors, bioregion being only one. Some bioregions had few or no environmental education providers, however, so I chose to combine several areas. I changed my mind several times in making this map as to which region counties should be placed, but I think this final version works well and makes sense. Here are some issues I faced and why I chose to resolve them as I did:
The largest and most diverse area, the "Northern Mountains and Valleys" region, should rightfully be divided up into several smaller sections based on bioregion, but the Cascades and volcanic tablelands would only have had one expired member provider, the Klamath region would have had only one, the Sacramento Valley would have had two, and the Northern Sierra only a few more, so I felt it was best to combine them, at least for now.
The dividing line between the Northern and "Central Mountains and Valleys" region is based on several factors - the watershed boundary between the San Joaquin and the Sacramento Rivers is roughly used, and the geographic center of California is near North Fork, just south of Yosemite, and when you listen to the weather radio, it describes the southern Sierra as Yosemite and south. I also based the division on where the main population served by the providers in the area was located - especially for Mono County, which I believe rightly serves mostly Southern California because of water issues. Tuolumne County is not only in the San Joaquin watershed, but two major programs there serve Fresno and Stanislaus counties.
I've lived in each of these regions, and they definitely have a different feel. The boundary between "South Coast" and "Central Coast" is also somewhat arbitrary - I at first put Santa Barbara in the central coast area because when I lived there, the TV news referred to the area as the central coast! But again, I looked at which areas the program there was most likely to serve, and I put it in the South Coast along with Ventura. This is also partly because there are so very many programs in the Santa Cruz Mountains, taking one county off of that region made the page a bit more manageable in size. I may eventually have to separate the Santa Cruz mountains into their own region, even so.
Some of the counties should be divided into half, such as LA County, because the northern half is in the San Gabriel Mountains and Mojave Desert, which would fit more in the "Southern Mountains and Deserts" region, but I chose not to divide or duplicate counties, only to refer to neighboring regions in each section, mainly to make it easier for me!
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