The Isenhart family took a trip around the world to show their children the importance of understanding the global environment and, lucky for us, a portion of their travels involved working with the Daraja girls. Parents Chris and Jill Isenhart give us insight into their remarkable trip in an article published on Mongabay. Check out the excerpt below:

“Chip Isenhart: Both Jill and I have a lifelong passion for nature; we both focused on environmental science in college and built careers that reflected our strong, shared passion for environmentalism. We married in our early 20s and spent the first years pursuing various conservation fieldwork assignments across the globe working for multiple NGOs, like the WWF, Conservation International (CI), and the National Audubon Society. After several years abroad and completing masters degrees (at Yale), we started ECOS Communications—an environmental consultancy firm with the mission to help raise appreciation for nature by “connecting the public with the natural world”. ECOS develops master plans and educational exhibits for conservation groups, wildlife agencies, zoos, aquariums, and other public facilities. After a decade running various projects at ECOS (internationally and the U.S.), we wanted to slow things down a bit, and pursue a more family-oriented life. Thus our two children, daughter Hannah (13) and son Jesse (11).
Conveying our passion for conservation and environmentalism to our children, hasn’t always come easy. Despite our careers and our business, we found it challenging to compete for their interests in a modern world full of distractions (cell phones, their school friends and activities, “the Internet”, etc). Although we raised our children with a holistic approach and encouraged them to have a broad view of the world, they didn’t always understand our environmental passions. Despite our efforts, the question remained, “how do you teach a passion like ours, for the environment?”

Mark Szotek for Mongabay: Is this why you chose to take Hannah and Jesse on an extended global trip? Please tell our readers a little bit more about your journey.

Chip Isenhart: Our goal was to have an extended-family trip where we immersed our children in a variety of global cultures and landscapes. We wanted our kids to know firsthand there was more to the world than what mainstream America reflected, and we wanted them to develop a true understanding of the global environment. We also hoped our children would more fully understand the basis of our professions and, in doing so, better appreciate our projects and the shared environmental passions that really started our family.

Mark Szotek for Mongabay: What have been the highlights of this trip to date?

Jill Isenhart: There were so many memorable moments on this trip. I’d like to share a few according to the three main legs of our journey:

In Kenya, we focused our attention on the Ol Pejeta Conservancy (OPC), a world-class, wildlife conservancy that promotes an innovative blend of tourism and community-based conservation, and the Daraja Academy, a secondary school for underprivileged girls. Though their work is exemplary, the Ol Pejeta Conservancy can be described as a more standard ECOS client. It was the little known work of the Daraja Academy that really excited our family, and eventually led to a collaboration between the two organizations.

Daraja Academy students come on full scholarships from across Kenya with a burning desire to better themselves and their communities through the gift of education. We’ve never seen students anywhere work so hard at all hours, day and night. For these girls, education wasn’t a “chore”; it was a hard-earned privilege. Their example and passion for learning left a lasting impression on our kids.

While Daraja students are all very bright and extremely motivated, they face a significant problem regarding continuing their education after graduating from the academy: they must wait a year or more to learn if they will receive university scholarships. It’s during this time that many of the girls return to their home villages, where they are often forced into arranged marriages by their impoverished parents, simply to receive a dowry.

To address this situation, we put on our consultancy hats and conducted workshops with Daraja students to identify vocational possibilities that also focused on environmental education. We worked with the school’s faculty to develop a “gap year” training course that would give the girls a foundation for future employment, as environmental educators and tourism guides in Kenya’s robust tourism industry, and/or improve their opportunities for future university study.

Though OPC and Daraja are neighbors in Kenya’s Laikipia Province, these two groups had never connected. Inspired by the many positive experiences they had at OPC, Hannah and Jesse came up with the idea of introducing their new Daraja Academy friends to this organization. Subsequently, we were able to establish an environmental education and field guide skills program that will take place at OPC for a group of Daraja graduates in 2013. An urgent community need could be met just by fostering new connections between groups that were already neighbors. On this trip, our kids were teaching us some of the basics, like neighbors helping neighbors.”

Read the full article here!