There is a question that many children in Romania have never asked themselves, although they live just a few steps away from forests, rivers, and protected areas: “What job can you have if you love nature?”

The project “Growing with Nature – Education and Green Jobs for the Future” started precisely from this question and brought it directly into classrooms in rural communities located near protected areas in Brașov County.

What We Did

Through the Green Jobs Caravan, Propark – Foundation for Protected Areas reached eleven schools in rural communities located near Piatra Craiului National Park, Bucegi Natural Park, and the Dumbrăvița–Rotbav–Măgura Codlei protected area. Hundreds of lower secondary school pupils discovered, through interactive activities, that nature is not only a landscape to admire, but a living ecosystem, full of professions, responsibilities, and real opportunities.

Each meeting with the pupils included several types of activities, designed to work together:

- watching episodes from the “People for Nature” film series, which presents real professionals working in nature conservation in Romania: rangers, biologists, chiropterologists, and nature educators;

- exploring the brochure “What Jobs Can You Have If You Love Nature?”, which presents more than ten professions connected to protected areas, with clear explanations about what each specialist does, where they can study, and what it means to work for nature;

- playing the interactive Ozobot game, using small robots that can be programmed through colour codes, with which the children reconstructed a protected area in miniature and simulated the missions of a ranger, biologist, or protected area manager;

- exploring interactive 360° panoramic images taken in real habitats in Romania, through which pupils were able to discover rare species, pressures on nature, and the role of the professionals who protect them, directly from the classroom.

What Happened in the Classrooms

The children’s reactions said, every time, more than any statistic could.

“Is there really someone who gets paid to study bats?” asked a pupil from Zărnești, after watching the episode about chiropterology.

“You can be paid to take people into the mountains and explain what they see? But I already know all the trails here,” said a boy from Măgura, while browsing through the green jobs brochure.

And during the Ozobot game, the children created stories in which a teacher takes pupils into the forest to check bat habitat and steps in to stop illegal tree cutting — a scene imagined by them, but rooted in the reality they live every day.

According to the school principals and teachers from the schools we visited, environmental education does not only make children better informed. It makes them more responsible, more empathetic, and more able to think of solutions — because they understand, perhaps for the first time, that the nature around them needs them.

Why This Matters to Us

At Propark, nature education is not a project separate from our conservation mission — it is part of it. A protected area does not survive in the long term only through management plans and legislation. It survives through the people who understand it, respect it, and choose to work for it. And those people are being formed now, in school desks, in rural communities near the forests and meadows they may one day protect.

Through this project, we also reached beyond the classrooms visited by the caravan: 124 teachers, educators, and professionals working with children registered for the free online course on the cen.propark.ro platform, where they discovered interactive environmental education methods that they will now implement directly with their groups. The practical part follows — classroom activities — because the impact of a project like this does not end when the caravan leaves.

The project “Growing with Nature – Education and Green Jobs for the Future” is part of the national programme “Mobility Matters”, funded by Dacia Foundation for Romania, sponsored by Automobile Dacia, and implemented by Propark – Foundation for Protected Areas, together with our partner, Krontechies Association.

Watch the project film and discover what nature education looks like in action: Growing with Nature – Green Jobs for the Future.