About the LEAF Program

 

LEAF, Wisconsin's K-12 Forestry Education Program, was created to help promote forestry education in Wisconsin in 2001. Since then, LEAF has provided professional development to thousands of Wisconsin's teachers, provided curriculum to hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin students, and registered over 25,000 acres of school forest land.

LEAF is a partnership between the Wisconsin DNR-Division of Forestry and the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point's Wisconsin Center for Environmental Education.

Vision
LEAF envisions inspired and informed citizens actively engaged in sustaining healthy forests and communities.

Mission
LEAF’s mission is to integrate learning in and about Wisconsin’s forests into K-12 schools to provide the knowledge, skills, and ways of thinking necessary to sustain our forests and communities.

Values 
The noted core values directly underlie the LEAF Program. They provide guidance in delivering program services and products, and directions we pursue as a program. We desire to build a sense of shared values with our audiences as they interact with the LEAF Program. We believe:

  • Humans are dependent upon and connected to Earth’s systems
  • Forests are life support systems for life on Earth
  • Wisconsin's forests can be managed sustainably for economic, ecologic, and social benefits
  • Forestry education is integral to K-12 learning, across all grades and subjects areas
  • Healthy communities are dependent upon informed and engaged citizens
About Us
LEAF connects formal and non-formal educators in Wisconsin with quality forestry education materials.

LEAF is a partnership program between the Wisconsin Center for Environmental Education in the College of Natural Resources at the UW-Stevens Point and Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources-Division of Forestry
LEAF's Integrated Approach to Forestry Education
LEAF works to fully integrate its and its partners’ services and resources to provide a comprehensive and holistic approach to forestry education.

Teachers are LEAF’s primary audience. Developing teachers’ forestry literacy is an important key to expanding forestry education in schools. No single experience is going to result in their forestry literacy. LEAF strives for our programmatic areas to be interrelated components of a systems-based approach to forestry education.

As we move ahead, we foresee a greater depth and diversity of LEAF services and resources within our priority programmatic areas to accomplish this.