Raising Children Connected to Nature
Damien Raffa pictured on the right
Meet Damien Raffa, who has dedicated his career to connecting children with nature. The type of nature spaces and activities that Damien and his colleagues have helped create in San Francisco create a system that supports everyday connection to nature. We need these systems for our personal well-being and to help heal our relationship with nature. This post is part of Profiles in Living Connected to Place, my series that portrays individuals living connected to place with intention and the support of systems that make it possible. Prior posts can be found here.
Damien Raffa deeply knows the myriad benefits of connecting children to nature. He spent much of his childhood exploring nature in the places where he lived: a large city park in Denver, a farm and convent orchard in suburban Connecticut, and a water-filled quarry outside of Philadelphia. Those places, and others, invited tree climbing, swimming, fishing, catching frogs, picking fruit from trees, and the excitement of free exploration outdoors. These nature-based experiences gave him what he refers to as “an expanding sense of adventure, curiosity, and wonder along with a sense of agency and belonging.”
As a young adult living in densely urban San Francisco and attending graduate school, Damien sensed a yearning to reconnect with the natural world. Rather than leave the city, he began to pay attention to his small, overgrown backyard with its blackberry bramble and ivy surrounding a large pine tree. Damien then pursued certification in composting and gardening through an urban gardening association. There, he helped create a garden in an inner-city neighborhood.
After a short sabbatical away from city life at an organic farm just north of San Francisco, he returned to the city. He began work as an environmental education intern for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA). This position became the springboard for the rest of his career.
Since 1998, Damien has worked as an outdoor education specialist and program manager at the Presidio Trust. This agency oversees GGNRA land in the northeast corner of San Francisco, known as the Presidio. The large site is a former army base turned national park site in the mid-1990s.
Early in his career, Damien noticed how little attention was paid to the human relationship with nature in our everyday lives. Seeking to reverse the trend, he has spent the last 25 years designing place-based programs and projects for families and children. He and his colleagues have curated a wide range of experiences: weekend family programs, habitat restoration field trips, self-guided park adventures, and other activities that immerse children and youth in nature.
In recent years, Damien helped plan and activate a 2-acre nature play area called the Outpost at the Presidio Tunnel Tops. The Outpost has been described as a “unique child-friendly landscape of multi-sensory and place-based learning, exploration, inquiry, creativity, and adventure, immersed in the Presidio’s native habitat.” As if straight out of Damien’s childhood, the Outpost engages children with nature amidst water features, fallen tree trunks, boulders, and opportunities to build with natural elements from the park.
Damien’s passion for connecting children with nature in San Francisco has extended well beyond the Presidio. He led the development of a citywide Children’s Outdoor Bill of Rights that has become a model for cities nationwide. He catalyzed a citywide collaborative known as San Francisco Children and Nature that brings together organizations and agencies to advance its vision, “Nature for Every Child, Every Day.” Within this collaborative, he coordinated a multi-agency team to develop an illustrated playbook that has inspired and informed the creation of a citywide constellation of nature exploration areas.
Having witnessed children engaged in nature throughout his career, Damien has seen all the benefits firsthand. He describes the most powerful of these experiences as “full-bodied and multi-sensory that infuse children with a sense of adventure.” Examples include feeling the texture of different plants and smelling their fragrances, creating art with elements of local nature, and the thrill of free exploration in nature-rich spaces. The abundant research on the benefits of nature connection to people’s physical, cognitive, emotional, social, and overall health and well-being assures Damien that these nature experiences are doing much good for children and society. Research also affirms the correlation between childhood nature and the development of nature conservation ethics and practices.
A growing societal movement is focused on addressing the deficit of independent outdoor play and quiet time in children’s lives through regular nature-based experiences. Damien and his colleagues at the Presidio and citywide through the San Francisco Children and Nature collaborative champion this movement. They remain steadfast in their goal of providing all children with opportunities to engage with nature in their everyday lives while nurturing place-based ecoliteracy.
Damien lives with his family in the Presidio. Damien’s daughter and their neighbors' children in the Presidio grew up ‘free range’ exploring nature like he once did. As Damien can attest from his own childhood, work, and parenting experience, time in nature is essential and must be a right for all children.
Local systems of nearby nature spaces and activities, like the one being created in San Francisco, are needed to reconnect our children with nature in their daily lives for the betterment of ourselves and the planet.