Instructor

Sunny Watts

For over twenty years, Sunny has been an educator with a passion for creating dynamic learning environments for individuals from diverse international backgrounds. When developing curriculum, she focuses on incorporating arts infused disciplines, so as to facilitate active learning where individuals fully participate in their growth and development. She works with GLA participants with a level of devotion, playfulness and flexibility in order to best light up their learning experience. |  Full bio>

J.B. Hoover

JB’s first work in the environment and education began when he was supervising a team of teachers in the Philippines preparing high school age Vietnam War refugees for US secondary school.  The school campus was flat, hot, and dry with very little vegetation.  JB obtained 50 Philippine Mahogany seedlings and two thousand Ipil Ipil seeds.  With the help of a forester, who also taught at the school, they developed a  program for the students to plant and care for the trees.  Watching the hundreds of surviving seedlings grow to provide shade and greatly improve the environment excited the students and even more so, JB.  Inspired by this success, JB developed a project in the northern mountains of the Philippines which was highly deforested.  Three partners, two in the Philippines and one in Japan, agreed on a rural development project that included large-scale reforestation.  Over the next 25 years of the project, local people managed nurseries and planted thousands of trees on school campuses, community land, private land and on church properties.