The Nature of Childhood

Dave Becker is being honored as a White House Champion of Change for his leadership and commitment to libraries and museums around the United States. 

Like many people of my generation, a good part of my childhood was spent exploring, playing, and learning outside. Growing up in a midsize farming community in Michigan, I spent hours in the woods, climbing trees, building forts, catching frogs, and getting as dirty as possible. I didn’t know how valuable these experiences were until I became a parent. For my own children to have any of these experiences, I had to help make them happen. My children needed me and other adults to provide the spaces and opportunities, which are rapidly disappearing as access to nature becomes more and more removed from the human experience. This has become a central commitment of my work with children and families.

For the past 12 years, I have had the good fortune to work for an organization that shares my commitment to connecting children with nature: the Chicago Zoological Society (CZS). The CZS Early Childhood Initiative, known as NatureStart, is connecting children with nature with the help of an incredibly talented team of people. It is my honor to represent them and accept the Champaign of Change award on behalf of them and CZS.

A major breakthrough in our NatureStart Early Childhood Initiative occurred in 2001 when we opened Hamill Family Play Zoo. This groundbreaking exhibit is firmly rooted in an understanding of child development, play, and learning, and it applies new understandings from the field of conservation psychology—the study of the relationships between people and nature—about how children develop positive relationships with the natural world. The exhibit includes a variety of indoor and outdoor settings in which young children can garden, play in the woods, build forts, make mud pies, look for bugs, meet animals up-close, pretend to be animal, and help care for animals in ways that are meaningful and relevant for them.

We Could All Use a Level Up

Matthew Winner is being honored as a White House Champion of Change for his leadership and commitment to libraries and museums around the United States.

In 1989 I was asking my elementary school librarian if she had any books on Nintendo or the Super Mario Brothers nearly every time I visited the library with our class. The language of my childhood friendships included unrelenting talk of end-game bosses, secret warps, and unlocking extra lives via the Konami code. Not surprisingly, today we rarely go a week in our elementary school library without one of my students requesting video game-related books or content. But while games may have once been perceived as a distraction or viewed strictly for their entertainment value, I believe video games play a unique role in today's 21st century classroom. It is for this that I am honored to be recognized as a White House Creating Lifelong Learners Champion of Change.

My work as a teacher librarian in an elementary school over the past six years has afforded me a number of opportunities to rethink the way we approach learning and in what ways we provide authentic learning opportunities for our students. Students today have access to information in ways unprecedented to the likes of those even a decade prior. It is the role of the teacher librarian to not only create lifelong learners, but also effective users of information and technology. 

Not ironically, many of today's students are already adept at using technology. It is our charge to model how said technology can be used to access and use information through an inquiry-based process. To be fluent in these technology tools is to speak the language of the 21st century learner.

Video games have been a part of mainstream culture throughout the entire lives of today's learners. This realization informed many of the steps I have taken to integrate gaming into my library program and instructional practices. 

A Unique Approach to Healthy Communities

John Urban is being honored as a White House Champion of Change for his leadership and commitment to the ideals of the YMCA.

Greater Rochester Health Foundation is honored to be recognized as a Champion of Change, and thanks to the YMCA of Greater Rochester for the nomination for this prestigious award.

The Health Foundation was created in 2006 with a clear mission: to improve the health status of all residents of the Greater Rochester community (nine counties) including people whose unique health care needs have not been met because of race, ethnicity or income. Our definition of health is broad: health is about far more than health care, and health disparities are evident in all areas of health status, particularly in urban and rural areas.

We think of our role as “finding, funding and measuring.” We take a strategic approach to uncovering the community’s most pressing health issues,  invite skilled partners to implement outcome-focused programs to address the problems, and then fund professional evaluators to work with grantees to measure their results. Through this process we have had the privilege of working with many champions.

One of the most important of these local champions is the YMCA of Greater Rochester, focused on reversing childhood obesity in order to increase the number of urban children at a healthy weight. In a four-pronged 10-year strategy,  Be A Healthy Hero 5∙2∙1∙0, pediatricians, schools, child care providers,  families, street teams,  local government and community organizations have supported the cause of eating right and being active. Literally thousands of the area’s “little champions” know the 5∙2∙1∙0 jingle by heart.

Our neighborhood health status improvement initiative supports asset-based, resident-driven efforts to improve the physical, social and economic health of their communities. Neighborhood champions build upon the many strengths of their neighbors, local businesses and organizations to improve the “health” of their community in the way they have defined it. Improving health might include reversing open air drug markets, razing unsafe buildings and repurposing empty lots into community gardens and playgrounds, offering GED classes and providing micro loans for small businesses. No single neighborhood’s approach is like another’s.

Within the medical community, many work to champion the delivery of cost-effective, accessible, high-quality health care. They have developed medical innovations, identified and treated depression, initiated protocols to control hypertension and treat stroke, saved a federally qualified health center through an effective merger, and some, including the YMCA, have implemented evidence-based diabetes prevention programs.

It has been our special good fortune to partner with the YMCA of Greater Rochester since the inception of the Health Foundation.

John Urban is the President and CEO of the Greater Rochester Health Foundation.