As the fall semester gets underway across the United States, I’m thrilled to celebrate the publication of Seeds to Solutions, a fantastic collection of solutions-oriented environmental education resources now available to California public school students statewide, and free to teachers and students anywhere.

The Content Creation Lab– our by youth, for youth design team at Global Nomads– had the privilege of designing the 7th-grade science unit for the Seeds to Solutions curriculum. The multidisciplinary, inquiry-driven unit is the most ambitious youth-designed project we’ve produced yet! Tasked by the state of California to design a place-based phenomenon unit, our team of 33 young people from 17 countries chose to explore land subsidence in California’s Central Valley as a gateway to understanding California’s groundwater crisis. They posed the essential question: Why is the Central Valley sinking, and what can we do about it?

Wanting middle school learning to feel more like a game than a textbook, the youth designers invented original characters to guide students — including Jolfy, a cyborg coyote from the future who enlists learners to solve this intractable problem. Along the way, students encounter a hydrogeologist, a historian, a climate scientist, and a Central Valley farmworker and activist. The characters’ areas of expertise are modeled on real professionals whom the youth interviewed during the design process.

We spent nearly two years piloting, revising, and fine-tuning the unit (shoutout to our brilliant curriculum coordinator @Katinka Lennemann for her vision and tenacity!) to create a rich learning journey grounded in place-based solutions, Indigenous ways of knowing, and environmental justice frameworks. 

Teachers who piloted the curriculum have shared inspiring feedback, noting how science units are rarely grounded in historical context and that even typically disengaged students were excited to dig into the material, chatting about it in the hallways after class. 

This milestone is personal for me, too. I joined Global Nomads in 2022 to help bring climate justice learning to life for California youth — and this month marks three years in my role. What I didn’t expect was how transformative this by youth, for youth learning design model could be. Since the cohort that designed Seeds to Solutions cohort, I’ve had the privilege of working with youth from more than 40 countries on projects on a wide range of topics like:

• a youth-to-youth equity leadership training program,
• Real Youth, Artificial Intelligence, an open-access course on AI literacy, and
• our newest release, Neurodiversity Leadership and Belonging.

It’s thrilling to see Seeds to Solutions in classrooms now, sparking curiosity and agency among 7th graders. And it’s a powerful reminder: when youth lead the way in curriculum design, they create learning experiences that are engaging, relevant, and transformative for their peers.

I’m grateful to the amazing young people who made this possible, and I’m excited about what’s next for youth-driven curriculum design at Global Nomads.