Greenwich, CT - March 10, 2025
We continue our Activist Residency series by welcoming another inspiring group dedicated to systemic change—the Climate and Resilience Education Task Force (CRETF).
At Foundation House, we believe that transformative change happens when passionate leaders have the space to connect, strategize, and take action. That’s why we’re thrilled to share the next installment of Voices of Impact, featuring a conversation with Emily Fano, Director of Climate Resilience Education at the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) and a leader in climate education advocacy, with Richard Zimmerman, Executive Director of Foundation House.
In this interview, Emily discusses the urgent need for climate education, the momentum behind policy change, and the power of intergenerational activism. From working alongside the New York State Education Department to shaping a statewide blueprint for climate education, CRETF is paving the way for a future where students are empowered with the knowledge they need to take action.
Video highlights and full transcript below to learn how they’re mobilizing educators, students, and policymakers—and how you can get involved.
From grassroots advocacy in NYC schools to leading climate education at the National Wildlife Federation, Emily Fano shares how her passion for sustainability grew into a movement for climate literacy and resilience.
The Climate and Resilience Education Task Force (CRETF) launched a Youth Steering Committee in 2020, growing from 7 to 50 students today who engage in a year-long program focused on climate education, peer-to-peer teaching, and advocacy, including lobbying for legislation and mentoring younger students on climate issues.
CRETF fosters intergenerational collaboration through policy advocacy, coalition-building, and strategic planning, using its residency to deepen relationships, refine priorities, and invite public participation in shaping New York’s climate education roadmap.
With growing public and legislative support, the CRETF is driving climate education forward in New York and beyond, creating a replicable model that empowers youth, engages policymakers, and fosters local action for global impact.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Part 1
Richard: Hi, Emily.
Emily: Hello.
Richard: So excited to have you and your team at Foundation House. Before we get into the Climate and Resilience Education Task Force, we'd love to hear about you. Why are you passionate about this space? How did you get into it? What's your story?
Emily: Sure. I'm Emily Fano. I'm the Director of Climate Resilience Education at the National Wildlife Federation, and I want to begin with… I always loved animals and nature as a child. I grew up in Italy, where I feel like the culture was very different. There was no waste. I spent a lot of time with my grandmother in the kitchen, and everything was repurposed or reused. When we were hot, we would close the shutters and the blinds. If we were cold, there was no central heating, so we would wear sweaters. When I moved to the United States, my father ran the water department at the United Nations, and I became very conscious about wasting water. Fast forward to when I had children, and they were in the public schools in New York City--you know, that sensibility kind of came with me, and I was really horrified at the lack of consciousness around waste: wasting food, being thrown away in the garbage, the lack of education for our children about basic environmental concepts. Also, children were eating off of styrofoam trays, which really horrified me. So, some parents and I set about changing things in the schools. We removed the styrofoam trays and replaced them. We launched a composting pilot in eight schools that became a model for the citywide program that's currently underway.
Richard: Wow.
Emily: I felt very proud about that. And in 2012, I kind of had “the climate awakening” when I took a training with Vice President Al Gore and his Climate Reality Project, and I became a trained Climate Leader. Shortly thereafter, I was hired by the National Wildlife Federation to grow their EcoSchools program in New York City, and I started on my journey working with teachers and students to design and implement programs in schools for students to learn about conservation and climate issues.
Richard: This is an amazing story! And what's really interesting is this grassroots work turned into a job for you.
Emily: Yes, exactly right.
Richard: You had this passion as a child, and growing up, you had the direction from your father.
Emily: Mmhm.
Richard: Then you moved to the United States, which may not be as sustainably oriented as what you grew up with.
Emily: Yes.
Richard: And then you and a group of mothers– just on your own, you didn't form an organization. You just jumped into it, and talked to the schools?
Emily: Yes, we got eight schools on board, and then we presented our data to the Department of Sanitation.
Richard: Where is this, in the New York area?
Emily: Yes, it was in Manhattan, and it was about 2012 when the city adopted the pilot, first in 120 schools, then in 600 schools, and then in the whole program–the whole system of 1,800 schools.
Richard: A force of how many mothers? Four?
Emily: Five.
Richard: Five!
Emily: Five mothers.
Richard: Would you call yourself anything?
Emily: No.
Richard: Wow. That's such a great story! It shows that people can just do things themselves and have influence too. Because in this world, in some ways, things are so daunting, and you feel a little bit helpless.
Emily: Absolutely.
Richard: That's so exciting. And then how did you come across the Al Gore program?
Emily: I don't recall how I came across it, actually, I don't know. I think it was fate, really, that brought me to it. Perhaps I found out about it from a friend or a colleague who said, “Oh, you should apply for this." So, I did.
Richard: You just applied?
Emily: Mmhm, and I was accepted. It was in San Francisco, and actually that's where I met Harriet Shugarman, who is here with us at the activist residency. She has become a dear friend as well as a mentor to me. She was one of the first trainees with Al Gore back in 2007 or 2009. She is just a force of nature in the climate space, and she's become a real mentor and a friend.
Richard: Wow. Okay, so that already is a huge story. And as I said, it's so inspiring. Then, you got hired by National Wildlife Federation, so you jumped right into the sector, right to work.
Emily: Mmhm, yes.
Richard: Was it at that time that the Climate and Resilience Education Task Force had been formed? Or did you help form it? Let's hear about that and what it’s about.
Emily: Sure. I spent several years growing the EcoSchools program. It's actually an international program, in close to 100 countries now.
Richard: The EcoSchools Program at NWF?
Emily: Yes. And NWF is the sole U.S. host of that program
Richard: What are EcoSchools?
Emily: EcoSchools is a free program where schools can register to become an eco school. We have online resources where students can investigate a number of environmental and conservation issues, from energy, waste, water, and biodiversity. They essentially follow a step by step process to learn about a topic, identify a problem, and take action in their school. And a lot of times, students will actually solve a problem, like discover that there's a leak in the main water lines, for example, and will conserve water. Or, they will grow gardens that support wildlife, or they will implement an energy conservation program in their school. So, they are actually solving real world problems.
Richard: K through 12?
Emily: K through 12, yeah.
Richard: And this is across the world now?
Emily: Mmhm.
Richard: So this program has been up and going, but growing, right?
Emily: Yeah, it was launched in 1994 by the Foundation for Environmental Education in Denmark. Every country has a host organization, and NWF is the host for the United States.
Richard: Gotcha, so every school should sign up for this?
Emily: Yeah.
Richard: Okay. Then, there's the Climate and Resilience Education Task Force, which is a mouthful.
Emily: Yes.
Richard: otherwise called…?
Emily: CRETF
Richard: Okay.
Emily: Yes. Before that, in 2015, I co-designed a Climate Resilience Education Program–now called Resilient Schools and Communities. That is a program where we are actually educating students about climate science, climate impacts and solutions–engaging them and taking action to ameliorate a climate issue in their community.
Richard: So this was within NWF?
Emily: Yes, within NWF.
Richard: And with the EcoSchools? It was a kind of curriculum?
Emily: Yes, it was its own program, with its own curriculum and a partnership with other organizations. Today, for example, we are working in a frontline community in Coney Island, Brooklyn. We're restoring the dunes there to protect the community from coastal flooding, storms, and erosion that's happening in the community there. Then, in 2018, I co-founded the Climate and Resilience Education Task Force to fill knowledge gaps in our schools around climate education because students are really only getting an hour of climate instruction per school year, if they're lucky.
Richard: An hour… what? An hour per semester?
Emily: An hour per school year. That's really if they either take environmental science, which only 3% of students take, which is an AP class, or if they have a passionate teacher who goes above and beyond and takes it upon themselves to teach them. We really felt that it was important to expand access to climate education as broadly as possible, and to also give the teachers the training they need to teach about this topic, because most teachers don't feel confident about it because they've never had training in pre service courses to prepare them to teach in K-12 classrooms about it.
Richard: Yeah, it's hard enough to talk about climate, and then people can approach it in a very scientific way, and that's accessible for some, but not others.
Emily: Exactly.
Richard: So you have to learn many different ways to talk about this topic.
Emily: Sure, yeah.
Part 2
Richard: So more about the Task Force. Tell us more about it, and then lead us into the residency here. I had a chance yesterday to meet with you and your fabulous team. I was so excited and heard every one of their stories. I'm excited to hear about what you guys are cooking up.
Emily: Yes, so we're cooking up a lot of things. I think what's important to note is that we have a youth steering committee that was launched in 2020 because we realized that youth are the primary stakeholders of their education. I'm very excited to say that we started with seven students in 2020 and now we have 50 students that meet every week. We have a 28-week syllabus where we are engaging students in really helping them understand that climate education is a climate solution. It's a foundational climate solution that without understanding what's happening in the world around climate, the impacts that it's having in every sector of society, they're not going to understand how to envision solutions and how to ideate solutions to what's happening. So we really approach their education and mentorship as kind of supplementing what they're not getting in their classrooms.
Richard: And is there peer to peer teaching? Do students share and teach each other?
Emily: Yes, that actually happened last year where some of our high school students decided to create a presentation for a group of third graders in one of our students former elementary school. They spent half a day with the children talking to them about what they experienced when the skies turned orange from the Canadian wildfires, and the children were very anxious because no one had talked to them about it or explained what was happening. They were just told to put masks on, hurry home, and they were frightened. We know that children are very anxious about what's happening to the climate. They are living through floods and wildfires, and yet they're not learning about this in school. We're very proud of our students. We had two students yesterday, speak to an auditorium of 500 teachers at the Mid-Winter Climate Institute of the Department of Ed in New York City.
Richard: Wow. How old were the students?
Emily: They are 17 and one is an alum, so she's 19 now.
Richard: And they spoke to all the educators?
Emily: They spoke to the educators.
Richard: Wow.
Emily: They led a workshop for 40 educators before the auditorium panel. We're really mentoring students to develop these soft skills like public speaking and meeting facilitation. They are speaking to their elected officials about their desire for more climate education. We've taken them to our state capital to lobby for a bill that we helped to draft, and some of them helped to draft a bill.
Richard: In New York State?
Emily: Yes, and we're engaging them in drafting legislation, in understanding the legislative process, so that they can become civically engaged as well.
Part 3
Richard: That's great. I'm glad you brought up the climate anxiety. At Foundation House, we're really leaning much more into mental health issues, and this is becoming an issue within that umbrella. So, we all have to learn how to work with that, and cope with that, and support each other. Another is climate justice. My sense is that you touch upon that as well in your programs?
Emily: Yes, we really prioritize environmental justice and climate justice and talk to the students as well about what that is and how frontline communities are impacted first and worst when climate impacts hit, We also talk to them to make sure that they understand that and prioritize working with disadvantaged communities as well when we do our work.
Richard: So if I was an educator or a school administrator, or I was a student– this sounds like just a great area to delve into– but how does one engage with this? And how do they reach out to you?
Emily: Sure. I neglected to say that we are an intergenerational coalition. We have adults also working with us. We are working with the State Education Department. We're actually the only organization working with the State Education Department, so we hold public meetings for our intergenerational cohorts. We are encouraging people to join our coalition, whether you're an individual or an organization. We welcome people to attend our meetings. We also posted a toolkit for action on the policy page of our website at cretf.org/policy where we invite people to contact their elected officials in support of climate education, specifically in support of a bill that we are proposing that was co-drafted in partnership with the State Department of Education. Now, as a result of this residency, we are actually creating a strategic plan for implementation that will include several working groups. We're finalizing those now, but we invite interested members of the public to join working groups because we want to tackle several different components of a platform that we created. We created the only New York statewide platform for climate education where we have identified best practices from different states. We have proposed a blueprint for statewide implementation of a robust climate education program, and it has several components. So, in the next couple of days, as we finalize our strategic plan here as part of the residency, we will identify those working groups, and we will invite interested people to to join us in the work that needs to be done.
Richard: We’d love to stay involved with this and be informed. On the residency, what was the experience, and is it helpful to bring everybody together? How many days were you here? What was the feel of it?
Emily: We have been here for five days. We were so in awe of this place. It's the most beautiful place that we've ever seen. It's comfortable, it's welcoming. It was really, really important for us to come together as a team to deepen relationships with each other and also have the time and the space to really drill down into the work that we've been doing. We had a wonderful facilitator, Esther Cowles. We did a lot of pre planning for this retreat. We met for several weeks with a small team to plan for a successful five days here, and we looked at our successes and our opportunities, and then began to really identify the priority areas that we wanted to focus on going forward that are really connected to our platform on our website. So we've identified several areas that we want to focus on, and now we're going to be drilling down and prioritizing those areas. Being here has really allowed us to have that time together, to really examine where we've been and where we want to go, and prioritize the tasks that we have.
Richard: It beats Zoom meetings, right?
Emily: It certainly does.
Richard: There's a need for zoom, but you're here for five or six days, or whatever the amount is, and living together, cooking…
Emily: Yes…
Richard: Did you get out on the property?
Emily: We did, it was so beautiful, and we were really impressed with the grounds. It was just lovely.
Richard: I think you know this, but we started out with an with an artist residency.
Emily: Yes.
Richard: The activist residency is relatively new for us. Grace Whittaker runs that program, and we're just sort of learning about it, but each experience we've had has been very positive.
Emily: Yes.
Richard: And we do find that it's really helpful for teams needing to get together, or hatching new ideas or creating strategic plans, but also bond. I think it's really important, supporting each other too. I mean, this is a this is a big topic at this time of our world.
Emily: Absolutely, yes.
Richard: I think it's important for us to all get together, get more positive, get support.
Part 4
Richard: In that vein, how are you looking at the future and do you see hope in the future?
Emily: Yes, I think we do, despite the turbulent times that we find ourselves in. We are all feeling very positive about what we are able to do within our state. New York is still a fairly progressive state, and while we may have our problems, we feel that we can get a lot done in our state. As I mentioned, we are the only coalition working with the State Education Department, so we have a good, solid partnership with them, and we also are very happy in the knowledge that 83% of New Yorkers support climate education.
Richard: Wow, okay.
Emily: We know that students want it, teachers want it, parents want it, and we have statewide support for it. At this point, it's really about moving the work forward so that we can achieve our goals and give students the education that they need and deserve. We feel optimistic about what we can accomplish together. And we have such a wonderful team.
Richard: Good, good. I am. Action starts with awareness, education, and then you guys move into action. When people are becoming more aware, then seeing things that they can do and doing them as a group, everyone feels better in this world where place-based is going to become extremely important.
Emily: Yes, yeah.
Richard: So it's not about national or global. It could be a little more daunting. But say, “okay, what can we do”, just like what you... the moms did!
Emily: Yes.
Richard: I mean, that was just amazing and sort of set the stage for the changes in the school system.
Emily: Yes.
Richard: So I think it's really important for all of us now to find hope and inspiration and positivity among each other and look for what we can do, band together locally, and just go for it, because I think we're all passionate about it.
Emily: Yes, yes, absolutely. The other thing that gives me hope is that after several years of working with the State Education Department, the Board of Regents, which oversees the State Education Department, has now made climate education a budgetary and legislative priority. I don't think that would have happened without CRETF and the work that we have been doing for several years to really elevate this issue in the public discourse and push our education policy makers to acknowledge its importance. And so that's another thing that we feel very hopeful and positive about is that this is now a recognized priority among our state education policy makers.
Richard: Right. And I know Foundation House is in Connecticut, we're neighbors. It's natural that we will work together. And I think Connecticut is also leaning into this space as well. So hopefully the work that you're doing will help them. And so that you have two states together, and then another state and another state.
Emily: Yes, and we know that New Jersey has mandated climate education across all grades and content areas. Maine is offering professional development to teachers there. Illinois passed a Climate Education mandate as well. So we have many states across the country that want to offer this to their students. California, Washington were leaders, early leaders. So we feel very positive that we are also going to create a model once we have proof of concept that can be replicated across the country. The beautiful thing is that this intergenerational model is one in which we can support our youth, but the youth give us hope and inspiration for a better future.
Richard: Perfect. Well, that's a great ending. And just as a reminder, how can people connect to your organization again?
Emily: Sure, yes. They can go to our website at cretf.org and poke around. We have a membership link that they can use to join our group and we will add them to a mailing list where we will invite them to special events, workshops, and to our state capitol to lobby for legislation.
Richard: Perfect. I'm looking forward to getting involved and Foundation House as well. And on behalf of Foundation House, we want to thank you for this interview and for your leadership with the team and your team itself, for coming into the activist residency.
Emily: Oh, thank you so much. We're so grateful. So grateful.
Richard: Okay, great, thank you.
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