Steering Committee

The Collaborative's steering committee is made up of representatives from participating research institutions, science centers, and environmental organizations. The steering committee is responsible for fiscal oversight of the Collaborative, fundraising, member services, organizational development, scientific review, and the implementation of new projects. It meets bi-monthly to plan events and activities, formulate goals and future directions, and allocate resources. Changes in the composition of this committee are made at the start of each year.

Work Groups

Professional Development
This committee plans membership meetings designed to educate members, increase institutional awareness of current research, and create shared programming opportunities.

This work group considers:
1. What type of training and professional development should NESCC offer its members.

2. How the Collaborative can help its members incorporate climate change into their exhibits and educational programs (e.g., the Climate Change Backpack and the Speaker's Bureau).

Iain MacLeod and John Anderson lead this work group.

"Greening of the Campus"
The obvious place for NESCC members to engage their audiences about using energy and natural resources more efficiently is in its facilities. Many of the science centers have already completed or are planning to undertake major building or renovation projects. Most of these projects have incorporated design approaches that used sustainably produced materials, energy efficient systems and passive solar orientation. Wherever possible, the Collaborative would like to showcase sustainable practices and technologies, and educate the public about their benefits. This committee works with NESCC members to make “green campuses” a shared vision and help them incorporate “green initiatives” into their educational curriculums

Peter Arnold, Paul Leveille, and Sarah Hammond Creighton lead this work group.

Exhibit Design
This group develops ideas for new exhibits and programs. Recent exhibit planning work has focused on exhibits that will allow visitors to test their personal assumptions and consider actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Exhibits are designed in modules to accomodate the varying exhibit spaces at NESCC member locations. Projects always take into consideration elements that can be tailored to the specific focuses of the participating science and nature centers, museums and planetariums (e.g mountains, ocean, space, woodlands, lakes...).

Current members of the Exhibit Planning Team are: Will Abbott, John Anderson, John Pickle, Janine Bloomfield, Jeanne Gerulskis, Iain MacLeod, Deb Meese, Steve Hamburg, and Richard Polonsky.

International Environmental Workshop Series:  Earth Systems and Climate Change
Sponsored by the Wright Center for Innovative Science Education, a group of ten NESCC interpreters and teachers have come together to develop a science team to participate in five environmental workshops on earth systems and climate change.  Each workshop in the series will focus on change from the perspective of one of Earth's spheres: biosphere, lithoshere, cryosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere.  The research and workshops in this series will held in the United States and Europe to facilitate participation by an international audience of teachers.  Each workshop will contain 20 teachers (10 teams of 2 teachers).  The program will take place between 2003-2005 in Montana, the Bahamas, Maine, Great Britain, and Switzerland.  Resulting curricula will be available to NESCC members.

The NESCC team is led by Pat Harcourt and includes participants from Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.