So every year during a convenient-to-tax-time window CERES, our parent organisation, has its annual appeal.  This year the focus is on supporting CERES’ environmental education programs; firstly because nobody is teaching this stuff on the scale that CERES does and secondly because the programs are really quite extraordinary.

Each year over 60,000 school students, like the cute bunch in the picture above, roll into CERES to get hands-on with soil and water, plants and creatures and day to day life of other peoples.  They come to find out first hand where our water, food and energy comes from, how indigenous people and cultures from around the world live with their environments, how they can live in harmony with the world around them. A further 800,000 students and their teachers participate in programs CERES teachers delivers in schools across Victoria.Thirty three years ago right in the middle of a major Australian city a 10 acre tip site was gradually transformed into a natural oasis.  The children and adults who come to CERES today find a living, working example of how a community took responsibility to turn the wasteland it helped create into a place to learn, grow and play.  The message that underpins CERES is embodied by the land it sits on; that the damage we do to our world can be fixed if we choose to.

One day the kids who learn from CERES at the park and in their schools will run this country.CERES is playing a long game; changing the world by helping young minds understand that our needs and desires for food, shelter and energy are intimately connected with the fates of our creeks and rivers, our mini-beasts and tadpoles, our chickens and our kingfishers, our gardens and forests.  And it’ll be the things they see, hear, smell, touch and taste from CERES that will help them work out how they choose to live on their planet.

Click here to donate online.  Donations are tax deductible and you’ll receive a receipt for your donation by email instantly.
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