Youth Education: 2025 In Review
By Ellie Falk, CGC Youth Education Coordinator, and Mary Dudley, CGC Director of Education
In 2025, our Youth Education team taught using the Civic Garden Center grounds and took programming throughout the region. We had a full schedule of school garden programs, field trips, Green Teens Challenge visits and teacher trainings during the school year. During the summer, we spent lots of time in our Pendleton Garden running Summer Sprouts sessions and in libraries leading nature-based programs.
Growing Our Teachers
Growing Our Teachers remains a strong program to support school garden educators. We held our first mingling event in 2025 so that participants across all four cohorts to date could meet, chat and share ideas with like-minded educators. In June, our fourth cohort celebrated the completion of their nine months together.
For our fifth cohort, which began in October, we received funding from the Dater Foundation to offer a participant stipend to educators accepted into the program, which boosted enrollment. This latest group of 13 educators represents PreK through 12th-grade schools across Greater Cincinnati, both public and private—and all of them are dedicated to enhancing garden-based learning for their students. (Meet Abe, a GOT graduate, in the article he contributed to our fall newsletter.)
“I connected with other educators and started spring vegetables for the first time.”
“I loved being in this group!”
Summer Sprouts
Our Pendleton Garden was put to good use hosting Summer Sprouts for the Peaslee Neighborhood Center and 3CDC Ziegler Park Summer Camps. Children ages 6 to 13 from each camp walked to the garden once a week to help care for it and cook a tasty snack using a garden-grown ingredient. Each camper received a Summer Sprouts cookbook with a collection of all the recipes we made together and photos of their time with us. Over the course of eight weeks, we saw 90 summer campers and 15 adult camp staff.
“Now I remember why I like coming to the garden, we make delicious food here. This is exquisite!”
Compost Kids
Compost Kids field trips are a great way for us to use the CGC as an outdoor classroom. In 2025, 13 field trips brought 346 students and 69 adult chaperones to explore and learn on our grounds. This program wouldn’t be possible without the amazing group of 10 volunteer facilitators, many of whom have helped with Compost Kids for several years.
“[I chose Compost Kids as a field trip for my students] to have a fun, hands-on field trip where the students could learn about how they can treat the environment better.”
“The Compost Kids field trip perfectly aligns with our science curriculum in second grade.”
School Garden Professional Development
Early in 2025, we wrapped up our New School Garden trainings for Cincinnati Public Schools. Due to restructuring within the District to create middle schools, just three of the five schools we trained activated their gardens in 2025. We also created a four-part asynchronous virtual training course for CPS called Getting Started with Outdoor Education in CPS that was launched on their professional development platform this fall and already has over 225 views!
School Garden Programs
We partnered with six schools to bring hands-on garden education to their onsite gardens in 2025. Nearly 30 schools picked up free seeds from the CGC in both the spring and the fall to plant in their gardens with their students. We helped three schools reactivate their gardens for in-school learning opportunities and after-school garden and science clubs. Over the course of the year, we conducted 28 programs for 584 students and 48 teachers and school staff.
“Each of the fourth grades gets a raised bed allotted to them where they plant salad seeds which are kindly donated by the CGC. The students are responsible for the planting, watering and weeding. When the salad is ready for harvest, the students harvest and take the salad to the school cafeteria for washing and serving during the school lunch. This is a good way to show students the full cycle of homegrown vegetables from sowing to growing and then to harvest for consumption.”
Queen City Food Quest
After a successful pilot with Gamble Montessori Elementary, Parker Woods Montessori and Midway school in the spring, we officially launched our Queen City Food Quest in the fall of 2025. We brought the program to Cheviot School, Sayler Park and Norwood Montessori and were able to test using the CGC as an optional field trip site for the third program session: Homegrown Pizza Party! So far this program has reached 101 students and seven teachers and school support staff as we work to bring a love of local food to fourth-grade students in and around Cincinnati.
“The goal of the program really came through. The kids really enjoyed it. Thank you so very much!!”
Lil’ Sprouts
Lil’ Sprouts remained a popular program at the CGC (where we held 22 sessions). After a cozy start to the year featuring a scavenger hunt for colorful frozen treasures, maple tree tapping and pancake making, we opened our summer with one of the largest gatherings of Lil’ Sprouts to date! We dissected flowers, made pollinator friends from upcycled TP rolls and so much more.
We also branched out to form a new partnership with MadTree Parks and Rec that brings monthly Lil’ Sprouts on the Go events to their Blue Ash site (for a total of seven sessions in 2025). By the year’s end, more than 250 participants had joined us at our gardens or on the go.
“Twice a month thanks to the amazing CGC team, we join other families for simple, joyful outdoor experiences—grinding acorn flour, painting the snow, singing on a winter on a winter solstice walk and connecting [my son’s] life with changes in nature as we watch the garden grow from winter to spring to summer.”
Green Teens Challenge
In 2025, our high school STEM-based competition, the Green Teens Challenge, continued to showcase the enthusiasm and interest that the next generation of environmental stewards will bring in the future. Through 87 entries, our eight participating schools demonstrated growing seeds indoors, extracting plant pigments, making natural home cleaners and giving back to our community in the form of service projects. We also completed 30 school outreach visits. Our Green Teens Team is thrilled that these monthly challenges help inspire the work that our educators already do.
“My students and I have been participating in the Green Teens Challenge for a few years now. We’ve been involved at different capacities, including as part of an after-school Environmental/Garden Club as well as in-class project-based learning with several of my environmental science courses. The Civic Garden Center has carefully crafted a unique, enriching, accessible and standards-aligned curriculum that fosters student choice and hands-on engagement. We’ve had a blast every year!”
“This challenge contributed to making the environment cleaner by removing the trash and improving the natural landscape. It helped preserve wildlife and made sure that pollution did not advance further. The project was a good experience that shined light on the importance of involvement in environmental efforts. One challenge we faced was removing stubborn trash, but we worked together to overcome them.”
“It has been a joy and an honor to work alongside the Green Teens as they find creative solutions to environmental issues. It’s inspiring to see the spark in them as they discover new ways to engage with each challenge.”
Green Teens Workforce Development
Through our Workforce Development Internships, we host students who learn and work alongside our CGC staff in order to get more applicable work experience before they graduate high school. Each intern experience is unique and tailored to the interests of the student. Over the course of their internship, students have the opportunity to support our youth education initiatives and horticulture projects as they learn more about urban agriculture and conservation. In 2025, we hosted eight student interns who racked up 416 training hours!
Green Teens Field Studies
Each spring and fall, we invite students to use the grounds and facilities of the CGC as a field station where they explore the natural world as they engage in relevant, research-based, STEM-focused activities that spark interest in green careers such as hydroponics, conservation, landscape design and plant pathology. In 2025, we launched a new focus on restoration conservation and hosted 13 field studies for 215 participating students.
Looking Ahead
2026 will bring some new opportunities for summer programming at the CGC. As our Summer Sprouts partners continue to grow the size of their camps, our Pendleton Garden can no longer accommodate them. Instead, we will be hosting two one-week Summer Sprouts summer camps at the CGC for students going into second through fifth grade! We will also offer garden programming to active school gardens and summer camps to take advantage of the growing season peak.
Our Youth Education Team is also hard at work on an overhaul of our free 52 Weeks in Nature resource, which features a year’s worth of weekly nature-based activities along with our staff’s tips for success. Our goal is to support caregivers by offering outdoor activities they can use to engage their Lil’ Sprout(s) with the wonders of nature at home.
Finally, a collaboration between Rotary Club, local 4-H initiatives and Cincinnati Public Schools has been taking shape to support high school student projects and career development. We look forward to continuing this partnership in 2026.