• note, this program is now booked through John Butler at john@vancortlandt.org and is available on fridays- With miles of hiking trails and hundreds of acres of natural area within Van Cortlandt Park, your students can help our staff in maintaining a healthy park. Depending on the season, the students will help out with trail maintenance, invasive plant removal or planting projects. Help keep Van Cortlandt Park a healthy beautiful ecosystem. Aimed at older students, middle school and older, the average volunteer day is 2-3 hours long and is customized to fit each group.

Explore Van Cortlandt forest, learn what a forester does and lend a hand with a stewardship project in the park. This program takes students on a hike through Van Cortlandt Park discussing what a forest is and what a foresters role in managing a forest is. Students then investigate a forest plot and spend time removing non native plants or planting native trees.

Freshwater Ecology explores the ecosystem of Van Cortlandt Lake. Students talk about what a man made, freshwater lake is and search through a leaf pack to collect, identify, and classify macroinvertibrates to determine the diversity of the lake ecosystem. (Note- students do not get into the water)

Get your students outside and hitting their 10,000 step goals! This program is designed to get students outside and exploring the trails of Van Cortlandt Park through a guided hike. Hikes range in length but average 2-3 hours and can include beautiful lookout points, forest and wetland areas, and geological features of the park.

Nature awareness encourages students to use their 5 senses to observe the park around them as they walk through the forest and wetlands. This program can be customized to fit any age, or topic and can focus on the seasons, trees, animals, ecosystems or simply getting your students outside and making observations. Programs for younger grades will run shorter if needed.

The Alliance Garden and Compost Site is home to 900 square feet of vegetables beds growing tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and more, and half a dozen compost bins that house bugs and worms that turn our food scraps and garden weeds into nutrient rich compost. Garden Explorations allows your students to connect the parts of a plant to common vegetables they eat, talk about pollinators, or search for worms and other decomposers in our compost bins. It's hands in the dirt educational fun.

Get your group outside to help grow vegetables for a local meals program, turn food scraps into compost, and make sure our garden is running smoothly. Tasks vary by group and season but include; general maintenance of the site; weeding and watering the 900 square feet of vegetable beds, harvesting produce; adding organic material to compost bins, chopping turning and sifting bins; and more.
We provide tools and gloves and information about what we do in our site and why, and you guys provide excited students ready to come spend the giving back to their park and community. Enter the park at Broadway and Mosholu Ave.

These programs are geared towards HS level regents and AP environmental studies students and aims to expose students to the concepts, methods and modes of field analysis used by biologists and research ecologists working in urban freshwater and forest ecosystems. Once booked education staff from VCPA will contact you to determine which of the following programs (based on real world on-going work being done within Van Cortlandt Park) you are interested in.
- Freshwater Ecology at Van Cortlandt Lake (Includes water quality measures, benthic macroinvertebrate identification, eutrophication)
- Invasive Species and Native Ecosystems (Covers causes and effects of invasive species and how ecosystems respond using a site within VC as a field study. Includes field work removing invasives)
- Storm Water and Van Cortlandt Park -COMING SOON-
- Deforestation, Canopy Gaps, and Water -COMING SOON-
Each topic is customizable to fit the needs of your class. VCPA will provide a lab for each that contains pre trip work and hands on, day of trip components aimed to focus on topics most likely to occur on AP or regents exams and provide required lab time.