As parents raising our children in an urban area, our four founding members met while trying to give our children a taste of what we'd experienced ourselves growing up:  the wonder - and power - of being able to name and observe things up close in nature, and a fluency and comfort with natural landscapes. ​But we noticed something critical as we began talking. While our city's diversity was an essential part of why we wanted to raise our children in and around Cambridge, we didn't see that diversity reflected equally in the use of the green spaces themselves, or in the educational programs taking place there. At the same time, we became aware of studies demonstrating how important nature play is for young learners, and the fact that kids - particularly city kids - had a more pronounced disadvantage than most when it came to green space access. Generationally, they joined countless peers who, studies suggested, were more familiar with characters in video games or exotic animals at the zoo than the urban wildlife outside their own front doors.​The Cambridge Environmental Literacy Project (CELP) was born out of this disparity.  We would like to make nature exploration available and possible for all of the children in Cambridge, and help them to understand that nature is not somewhere in a distant suburb, but all around them.