A second School Yard Ecology Workshop was held at Bina Hill Institute in November 2005; this is made possible by a grant to the National Audubon Society from the International Foundation.

Citizen Science has been the tool to teach the youth about environmental management.  For the past 3 years, wildlife clubs have been participating in Citizen Science monitoring of birds, rain and phenology in their communities. This concept fosters an understanding and ownership of science which can be applied to the local environment, and in turn, develops into community owned conservation and monitoring activities.

This was the second Cycle of Inquiry workshop which was held in the North Rupununi (others were held in Georgetown). Forty-three youths from the North Rupununi attended a four day workshop at Bina Hill from November 6 - 9, 2005.  The target audience of this workshop was the wildlife clubs of the North Rupununi, and included the 5 youth interns of the Bina Hill Youth Leadership Programme, most of whom are former presidents and members of their community’s wildlife club. 

The workshop was coordinated by Samantha James, the Community Development Coordinator at Iwokrama, and facilitated by Ricardo Stanoss, Audubon.  They were assisted by Odacy Davis a teacher from Georgetown who was the link for SYE in Georgetown schools and Waldyke Prince, the previous SYE and wildlife club coordinator.

Abbi Scipio, a teacher from Surama, and Rudy Edwards, former Community Environmental Worker, were the only two participants who had taken part in previous Cycle of Inquiry workshops, and who are also club coordinators.  During the workshop, several participants from previous workshops came by to say hello to Ricardo.  Most visitors are teachers and community leaders, some of which (Aranaputa and Surama wildlife clubs) use the cycle of inquiry as teaching tools in the classroom or with the wildlife clubs. 

Overall, Citizen Science has been a positive influence in communities, and whenever the Iwokrama outreach team happens to meet community members from other regions, they are requested to present their environmental education modules and to bring School Yard Ecology to them too. There are always requests to present this information in the South Rupununi to clubs in Nappi, St. Ignatius and Dadanawa in the south. The EPA also presented a School Yard Ecology workshop in May 2005 for only coastal clubs.

During outreach to communities, monitoring is defined as “keeping your eye on the environment so that you can care it”, and Citizen Science is defined as “not having to be a scientist to do science”. Iwokrama encourages communities and club members to use this methodology as it leads to local ownership of information and is a stepping stone to management planning and implementation.  These concepts are slowly taking hold, and as club members have grown up, they take their knowledge into the workforce and have taken up roles as rangers and managers for Iwokrama and Conservation International.  Club members are part of both the Iwokrama wetlands monitoring team as Research Assistants and of the El Dorado Aquarium Traders (a locally owned community based aquarium fish harvesting programme), incumbents in the Bina Hill Youth Internship programme, and some also work as NRDDB community tour guides.  Some participants of previous School Yard Ecology workshops in the North Rupununi are also in the process of obtaining their teaching certificates, and many older club members who attended the workshops assist and foster their younger peers in the clubs.