WorldBeat Center’s Outdoor Classroom

The WorldBeat Cultural Center in Balboa Park, San Diego and Casa del Tunel in Tijuana, Mexico have created an “Outdoor Classroom” program, an ongoing outdoor program in WorldBeat Center’s Children’s Peace Garden raising awareness about Sustainability, Urban Wildlife, Conservation, and Urban Gardening. Throughout the year, programs and workshops are set up to teach inner city children and adults about recycling, composting, gardening and bird watching. Such hands-on activities as urban bird watching, pollinator conservation study, and observing the life cycle of the monarch butterfly happen annually. All of these programs are designed for the inner city children of San Diego and Tijuana, many of whom have limited access to green spaces at home. The WorldBeat Center’s Outdoor Classroom is dedicated to teaching children in urban environments how to create a natural habitat, even in limited spaces such as their own apartments. The WorldBeat Center is proudly in collaboration with a variety of schools, colleges, and research labs to incorporate the children of underserved communities and in San Diego’s surrounding urban area as active participants in science through various programs, such as:

• Celebrate Urban Birds Project by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
• San Diego Botany For Kids workshops
• Monarch Watch
• Project Feeder Watch
• Children’s Performing Arts and Science Summer Camp
• Nature Fest, an annual citizen science event w/ Celebrate Urban Birds
• Solar Cooking

If your family lives in the San Diego area, there’s a good chance that a student from your family has been a part of a program at the World Beat! The list of pre through high schools that we work with is constantly growing, with over 10,500 visitors of all class levels from:

• High Tech High
• San Diego City High School
• High Tech Middle, Petite Ecole School
• Ramona High School
• Beth Israel Pre-School
• Upward Bound
• Kinship Project School
• Montessori School
• San Carlos KinderCare Learning Center
• Francis Parker Middle School
• Capri Elementary School
• G & K Afterschool Program
• Vista Public School
• Lemon Grove Academy Elementary
• San Diego Unified School District

  In 2015 alone we’ve worked with over 4,000 Higher Ed students and classes from these colleges and universities:

• Alliant International University
• University of San Diego
• University of California San Diego,
• San Diego State University
• San Diego City College
• Redlands Adventist Academy
• Upward Bound
• Oasis Exchange School
• Mesa College
• San Diego Unified School District.