For any education or outreach initiative, you need to think about your interaction with people. Do you need to get information to certain people? Do you need to talk things over with a group? Do you need to provide training for a new skill? Or do you really need to change how things are done?

Selecting a best education practice (BEP) depends on your overall goals and what you want to accomplish. If you aren’t sure exactly what you want to do, the BEP Decision Tree may help.

Whatever your purpose, there are strategies and resources to help you design the most effective initiative.

This section helps you explore opportunities and limitations of each of these strategies. But before you Plan your initiative, it’s important that you decide what you want to accomplish:

• Provide information (one-way communication)

• Communication (two-way communication)

• Education (formalized learning process)

• Capacity building

 

For a brief introduction to this topic, see:

Andrews, Elaine. 2000. Building Capacity, Educating for Community Action. U.S. EPA/Cooperative Extension Partnerships – NO. 6: Community-based environmental education (CBEE)

NOTE: Outreach categories are adapted from:

W. Scott and J. Fien, 1999. An evaluation of the contributions of educational programmes to conservation within the WWW network : Final Report. Unpublished report to the Worldwide Fund for Nature, Gland, Switzerland.