The Connecting Kids to Country Initiative aims to bring consistency in environment education opportunities for our rural youth. Experiences, encounters, and connection with the natural environment are critical to forming lifelong environmental attitudes and values. This initiative is about providing opportunities for our future stewards of the landscape to learn, explore, and foster connection to the world around them.

Gillamii obtained funding from the State Natural Resource Management program in 2020 to initiate Connecting Kids to Country. Since then many organisations and funding programs have supported various activities within the program including South Coast NRM, the Federal Government’s National Landcare Program, The Community Bank Tambellup/Cranbrook, Mt Barker Co-Operative, Flat Rocks Wind Farm and the Tambellup Community Crop.

Connecting Kids to Country has supported local schools with:

• Supporting environmental and cultural education opportunities including facilitating excursions and incursions.

• Connecting schools and students to environmental education specialists and local Noongar elders and educators.

• Resources and activities that align with the Australian Curriculum.

• Funding to support expensive exercises that often limit opportunity

• Implementation of the Know Your Patch Program, which aims to identify and courage a sense of place within our youth, and provides the framework to support young people to plan and carry out action projects that tackle the big issues of human impact, biodiversity. and ecosystem conservation at a local scale.

• Year 6 Primary School Ecological Camp Barna Mia