Zoë Banfield

U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS

Long-term Fellow: October 2024 - 2025
Mentored by Anne Marie Hoffman, VI EcoSchools

I am thrilled for the opportunity to participate in the Navigating Home Fellowship program at UVI to continue in my role as the St. Thomas/St. John program coordinator for the Virgin Islands Conservation Society’s (VICS) K-12 environmental education program, Eco-Schools USVI. Over the past two years we have worked with schools on projects in marine ecology and conservation, sustainable waste management issues, drinking water quality issues, biodiversity, food systems and more.

This year we anticipate working with Ivanna Eudora Kean High School, Charlotte Amalie High School, Bertha C. Boschulte Middle School and Jane E. Tuitt Elementary School to foster Eco-Clubs, help build and maintain outdoor learning spaces and school gardens and help schools execute sustainability actions from the Eco-Schools US model that will help them earn points toward higher levels of Eco-Schools certification at a national level. Over the next couple years we will be continuing to work with the Virgin Islands Marine Advisory Service to deliver its signature and evolving Water Heroes program. We’ll also be working with VICS’s other program, Virgin Island Clean Coasts (VICC) to continue addressing drinking water access in schools by assessing and maintaining water bottle filling stations, a project that we started in 2022 in collaboration with Environmental Protection in the Caribbean (EPIC). Looking to the future, I am confident that being connected with UVI’s Marine and Environmental Science department and the U.S. National Science Foundation will provide a network of informal mentors and opportunities that will help me grow in my capacity as an environmental science educator and communicator and a non-profit program manager while also expanding my grasp of what kinds of career paths might be open to me at the intersection between environmental science and community work