Community Partnerships and Awards
Community Based Programs for Schools and Community Support
Prince George's County Public Schools
The Schmidt Center
The center has an ongoing partnership with the William S. Schmidt Outdoor Education Center and continue to provide valued programming to PGCPS students. We will be continuing to provide programming and space for the 1st grade Schmidt Center programming in the Fall and Spring as well as the programing and space needs for the 4th grade Sunfish in the Classroom programs in the Spring.
Watkins Youth Nature Club
Our nature club offers teens from our community the chance to learn more about nature and interact with wildlife first hand. Other opportunities we provide are hiking, exploring the outdoors, shelter building, orienteering, and fire building. They have also helped us monitor our bluebird and wood duck boxes.
Website, Newsletter and Flyers
We make it easy for the community to come together by making all of our events and information easy to find. In an effort to reduce our use of paper, we have a website that guides patrons to our ParksDirect system that makes it quick and easy to sign up for events ahead of time. Our seasonal newsletters and flyers inform visitors of our upcoming events and programs but also make a note that they can schedule independent group programs as well as attend public programs. After they have expired, the newsletters are recycled through M-NCPPC's recycling program.
BUMBA
Watkins Nature Center works with the Bowie-Upper Marlboro Beekeepers Association (BUMBA) by providing them rental space for their meetings and they join us at many of our annual events. For over 14 years, Watkins Nature Center has hosted a low cost BUMBA short course on bee biology and beekeeping basics. Students learn how to setup a backyard hive, manage bees, harvest honey and pollen, and learn about basic bee biology and behavior and their importance to the world we live in.
Boy and Girl Scouts of America
National Park Trust
National Park Trust has been bringing the schools they Partner with to Watkins Nature Center for years. They aim preserve parks today and create park stewards for tomorrow. They also bring thousands of kids from under-served communities to our parks, especially through their Buddy Bison Program. While they are still bringing classes to us in person, during the pandemic they reached out to see if we could maintain connection to children in schools with our outdoor spaces. This is how our virtual hands-on programming came to be, and we still regularly see students from Montana, Illinois, Texas, and California because of this program.