All of us are vital elements in our ecosystem; we can destroy or we can restore. Knowledge marks the difference.

Building a better future demands a new kind of school. To offer a radically different educational experience, we have to radically reimagine how our program could be built. For if we want to equip our students with the insight, skills, and passion necessary to bring about transformative change, we have to model those lessons in every facet of our program, or we risk re-creating the education systems that are broken. At The Field Semester, our core belief in equity and the interdependence of all things shapes everything we do.

The Field Semester is an immersive semester program that reaches high-school students at a crucial moment in their personal and academic development. Our innovative program will bring 45 high-school juniors and seniors from diverse communities to live, work, and learn together on the land. Over sixteen weeks, through an exciting mix of intellectual study and experiential learning, students at The Field Semester will deepen their understanding of the social and biological ecosystems we share. Their days will be spent engaged in rigorous academic classes with lots of field-work, restoring and stewarding the watershed in which they will live, and managing the day-to-day operations of the campus including growing food, cooking, and maintaining the facilities. We aim to equip graduates with the tools they need to thrive as just, sustainability-minded leaders in every community they call home.

At the moment, the East Coast of the United States is served by three well-known environmental semester schools—The Mountain School in Vermont, Chewonki in Maine, and The Island School in the Caribbean. The West Coast has no comparable option.

The Field Semester will always operate on a simple value system. Good work is that which supports all people, all living creatures, and the Earth—ensuring safety and balance, diversity, belonging, integrity, and resilience. Destructive work opposes justice, human thriving, and ecological health and well-being. Humanity and nature do not reside in separate spheres or have separate fates or realities; nor are humans separate from one another. Everything is interdependent; well-being, in its true and lasting form, is collective; every action and every decision that every human makes is implicated both in ecology and human rights. The Field Semester values living systems and human rights and our community will work every day to nurture and promote both.