“Educar Forestando” Program: The formation of human values through the education with the tree.
Nacional.
Argentina

"Educar Forestando" Program began in 1990 and is an education training program, directed at kindergarten, primary and secondary school levels. Its objective is to strengthen certain values that lead to sustainable development, such as respect for natural resources, participation, solidarity, tolerance, and a prospective vision.

Program’s main idea is very simple: children learn to respect the environment, by producing and planting trees. Together with their teachers and relatives they build a tree nursery on the school courtyard and subsequently plant the trees in surrounding communities. The Program obtains positive behavioural changes toward the environment and other human beings in a short period of time, being also easy to diffuse.

The target group is children; teachers are seen as “partners” who make it possible to get to thousands of children on large scale and in a sustainable way through the educational system. ACUDE reaches teachers through an environmental training program using tree as an instrument to create sensitivity, and incorporating the production and planting of trees in teachers´ daily work.

Since its foundation 18 years ago it has become the largest environmental education program in Argentina, demonstrated in the number of people involved (150,200 children and 3,400 teachers trained) and in its positive environmental impact (513,345 trees produced and 202,941 trees planted).