Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center now has a free and public charging station for electric vehicles! Located in our Learning Center parking lot, our ChargePoint station is free for the community to use every day of the week from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Written by Michael Miller, current 2022-23 master’s student - It’s official! I finally began my graduate school journey to become an environmental educator through Goshen College’s Master of Arts in Environmental Education program at Merry Lea.
Joel Pontius joined the Merry Lea team in 2015 as director of PreK-12 environmental education, overseeing PreK-12 programming and the master’s students in their teaching practicum. In 2016, he became the Sustainability Leadership Semester (SLS) director and associate professor in the Sustainability and Environmental Education Department.
Tom Hartzell first arrived at Merry Lea in 2011 as a master’s student in environmental education, during which he also researched sediment contamination in the Elkhart River. Upon graduating in 2012, he joined the Merry Lea team as coordinator of residential undergraduate programs and an environmental educator.
Merry Lea is partnering with BABE of Whitley County to help support the well-being of families with young children. BABE provides incentives for pregnant women & families to participate in partner programs and services that benefit the health of infants and young children.
In celebration of Honoring the Headwaters: 10 Years of SLS, we interviewed three alumni from the Sustainability Leadership Semester (SLS).
Carol Good-Elliott, longtime environmental educator at Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center of Goshen College was awarded the Howard Michaud Award from the Environmental Education Association of Indiana (EEAI) for her lasting commitment in the field of environmental education.
This reflection written by Bekah Schrag, a 2016 participant in the Sustainability Leadership Semester (SLS), is one testament of many that illustrates how the SLS inspires students to bring human communities and the environment together.
“I have taken multiple leadership courses in hopes of becoming an entrepreneur. I knew most of the technical framework about being a leader, such as how to delegate responsibility, run numbers and how to be an example for others. However, I did not know what being a good leader looked like outside the business world before coming to Merry Lea."
“I am always taken back to the canoe trip when we stood in the center of the river and it was really hard, then we let the water move us and it was really easy. We need to remember that when thinking about controlling the environment.” (9.21.15)
