Sierra Watershed Education Partnerships

Mission

SWEP promotes environmental stewardship by connecting students to their community and local environment through comprehensive watershed education and service-learning.

What We Do

SWEP fulfills our mission by collaborating with local teachers, school districts and community partners to address pertinent environmental issues. SWEP programs, operating in the Tahoe-Truckee Unified School District (TTUSD) since 1996, emphasize service learning because of the multiple benefits to both students and communities.

• Students benefit by participating in meaningful learning activities that are relevant to their life experience, developing higher-order thinking skills such as analysis, problem solving, and decision-making, and exploring future career pathways.
• Communities benefit from service learning projects because the service activities in which the students engage address a specific community problem or meet a particular community need. An additional benefit is the creation of young community members with a strong sense of civic responsibility and the skills, experience, and leadership to accomplish community good.

History

Sierra Watershed Education Partnerships (SWEP) is a small, community-oriented non-profit organization based within the Tahoe Truckee Unified School District. We started out in 1994 as a small group of parents and teachers interested in providing comprehensive science education to the students in our local classrooms. In 1995, SWEP received a grant from AmeriCorps and Adopt-A-Watershed and began to incorporate science programs, outdoor field studies, and ecological restoration projects into the curriculum of our local school district. SWEP officially incorporated as a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization in 1996. We currently have two staff members, a committed volunteer core, and an active Board of Directors that collectively help us achieve our mission.