The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens in Palm Desert is providing more than $162,000 in scholarships and educational opportunities for local students, money aimed squarely at the children least likely to have visited a zoo or botanical garden before.
The scholarship that buys a field trip
The Wonderfully Wild Scholarship Program gives selected classrooms complimentary admission and educational experiences at The Living Desert. The zoo is explicit about the reason: for many of these students, the trip is their first visit to a zoo or a botanical garden at all.
That is a more consequential fact than it sounds. Almost everyone working in conservation can name the moment they first stood in front of an animal that changed how they thought, and a school in a district that cannot fund a bus is a school where that moment does not happen.
Students running their own projects
The second program is more ambitious. The Desert Defender Challenge, now entering its second year, asks students to create real environmental change on their own campuses rather than learn about it in the abstract.
In its first year, more than 2,100 students across five Coachella Valley schools took part, running projects designed to improve their own schools while building stewardship habits meant to outlast the assignment.
The Living Desert’s species work runs on the same site: it recently bred a black-footed cat and a sand cat, two of the hardest small cats in the world to reproduce.
Why this belongs on a zoo’s news page
Education programming rarely gets covered because nothing dramatic happens in it. But a zoo’s conservation work and its education work are the same work on different timescales: one protects a species now, the other produces the people who will protect it in thirty years.
The Living Desert sits in the Coachella Valley, in the middle of the desert its own collection is drawn from, which gives its students an unusually direct answer to the question of why any of it matters. The animals in the habitats live in the landscape outside the fence.
Quick answers
- What is The Living Desert providing?
More than $162,000 in scholarships and educational opportunities for local students, aimed at the children least likely to have visited a zoo or botanical garden before.
- What is the Wonderfully Wild Scholarship Program?
It gives selected classrooms complimentary admission and educational experiences at The Living Desert in Palm Desert. For many of the students, the trip is their first visit to a zoo or a botanical garden at all.
- What is the Desert Defender Challenge?
A program, now entering its second year, that asks students to create real environmental change on their own campuses rather than learn about it in the abstract. In its first year more than 2,100 students took part.
