Olympic Park Institute Receives $387,000 Grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

PORT ANGELES, Wash. -- Olympic Park Institute (OPI)—a leading environmental education organization—received a $387,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support its Diversity Initiative.

This initiative is a comprehensive outreach program that targets disadvantaged youth in Seattle and Tacoma's inner cities, as well as rural and tribal communities on the Olympic Peninsula. The grant is part of the Foundation's commitment to support Pacific Northwest organizations that provide opportunities for lifelong learning.

"This grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a tremendous boost for our efforts to reach out to the under-served communities in our region," said Maitland Peet, OPI's executive director. "With the natural world as our classroom, we are able to reach students in profound ways, connecting them to the beauty and wonder of the Olympic Peninsula, exciting them about environmental science and learning, and providing them with the tools and desire to become leaders in their communities."

The Diversity Initiative focuses on promoting environmental science and stewardship in areas with significant populations of Native Americans, African Americans, and other ethnic minorities, as well as economically depressed or low-income areas.

The Diversity Initiative's major components include:

The Diversity Initiative stemmed from a commitment by the OPI Board of Directors and staff in 1998 to reach out to students from a wide spectrum of backgrounds, and to ensure their active involvement in OPI's life-affecting programs.

"The experiences created by Olympic Park Institute have improved thousands of lives," said Paul McCarthy, a sixth-grade teacher at Mountain View Elementary School in Lacey, Washington, who brings his students to OPI. "I think of how some of my students had never seen the Puget Sound—several blocks from their houses—much less the Pacific Ocean, and how seeing and learning in an actual natural area has changed their lives."

The Initiative has been funded by program fees, retail sales, individuals, and Northwest foundations, including the Hugh and Jane Ferguson Foundation, Bullitt Foundation, Bank of America Foundation, and McEachern Foundation. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation award will enable the program to build on the support initiated by these sources over the next three years. Plans are underway to create an endowment to sustain the Initiative in perpetuity.

Founded in 1988, Olympic Park Institute is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing educational adventures in nature's classroom to inspire a personal connection to the natural world and responsible actions to sustain it. Over the past 12 years, OPI has grown to become one of the Pacific Northwest's premiere residential educational facilities, providing quality science education to school-age children, as well as teacher training, adult and family field seminars and conference services. OPI is one of three campuses of Yosemite National Institutes, recognized as one of America's leading institutions of science education. For more information, visit OPI's web site.