Meet Every Child Outdoors Founder Sarah Besse
Meet ECO Founder Sarah Besse
Every Child Outdoors (ECO) grew from a belief that play and learning with nature are essential parts of childhood. In this conversation, Sarah shares the experiences and ideas behind that work.
What led you to nature-based early childhood education?
This story begins long before I ever knew about forest kindergartens. At the New York City public elementary school I attended, our recess area was blacktop, but a London plane tree grew just beyond the chain-link fence, its branches reaching into the schoolyard. I remember children pulling leaves from those branches so they could hold them, feel them, and play with them. They were literally pulling nature toward themselves, an instinct researchers call biophilia, the human need for connection with living beings.
Fortunate to have had access to nature outside of school, I learned early how to grow vegetables, did not fear insects, and felt perfectly comfortable hiking in the rain. Few of my classmates had those same opportunities. This contrast stayed with me and shaped my belief that nature connection is essential for personal and collective wellbeing.
Years later, I was teaching at a public school. One day, I brought stalks of “glass gem” corn from my garden into the classroom. My preschool children examined the roots, stalks, leaves, and silk, removed kernels from the cobs, sorted them by color, counted them, and created artwork. To me, this was engaging hands-on interdisciplinary learning. A supervisor walked by and remarked “Oh, we only do science on Fridays.” But this was not simply science; it was also language, art, math, and social studies.
Around that same time, I watched the documentary School’s Out: Lessons from a Forest Kindergarten, which changed the course of my life. Seeing a forest kindergarten in Switzerland and realizing that children had been learning this way in Europe for generations made me want to create experiences like these for children in Boston. I opened my first nature preschool class in 2019 and have been building and learning ever since, always with the goal of making early childhood and environmental education more accessible.
How did you decide on the name Every Child Outdoors?
Our name reflects our belief that play, exploration, and learning with nature are essential parts of childhood, and that every child should have access to these experiences.
Our nickname “ECO” felt right too. Ecology is the study of relationships between living beings and the places they inhabit. That resonates with me because our work is ultimately about the relationships between children and nature, and with one another in community.
As nature educator David Sobel writes, “If children are to flourish, to become truly empowered, then let us allow them to love the Earth before we ask them to save it.”
What do you do for fun?
I love gardening. Recently, I helped coordinate the distribution of more than 400 strawberry plants to early childhood programs, schools, and nonprofits across the Boston area through Every Child Outdoors. I also play in a flute ensemble and am currently learning the harp.
