A six-year-old who has never crouched down to look at a flower up close has been quietly cheated of something. We can fix that, and it is not expensive to fix.
The science is settled on what kind of childhood produces an adult who cares about the natural world: it is a childhood that contains the natural world. Specifically, it is a childhood with regular, unstructured, hands-and-knees access to plants and insects and dirt — the kind of access that lets a kid notice that the same flower has different bees on it on different mornings, and that one of them is fuzzy and one of them is shiny and the shiny one is faster.
That kind of access is wildly unevenly distributed. A child in a leafy suburb is statistically a hundred times more likely to have it than a child going to school next to a six-lane road. The schoolyard, in other words, is one of the most consequential pieces of conservation real estate on the continent — and most of them are asphalt.
What the Fund does.
The Wild Patch Fund makes small grants to under-resourced public schools, classrooms, and after-school programs to put living things on the ground where their kids spend the day. Most grants are between $500 and $5,000. The grants buy:
— Native plants for a corner of an asphalt schoolyard.
— Raised beds, soil, and seed for a classroom garden.
— Field-guide kits and magnifying glasses for a third-grade classroom.
— A native pollinator garden in a strip of dirt next to the parking lot.
— Honoraria for a local naturalist to come spend a day with the kids.
We accept applications from any public school in the United States, but priority goes to Title I schools, schools without existing green space, and schools whose communities don't have other access to private gardens or yards.
How the money works.
One hundred percent of donations go to schools. The Fund is run as a separate, restricted program. Operating costs — the staff time to review applications, the website, the accounting — are paid from backyard.bio's regular revenue, not from the donations. We don't take an "administrative fee." We don't deduct overhead. A dollar you give is a dollar in a school's hands.
We also publish a full accounting of every grant: which school, how much, what it bought, what happened to it the next year. Annual report up on the site every January. If a grant didn't work out, we say that too.