Born in the Redwoods — Santa Cruz Mountains, 2003

HOWL , Hands On Wildlife Learning, was born in 2003 in one of the most awe-inspiring places on Earth: the ancient redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains in California. Among trees that had stood for centuries before any of us were born, a simple and powerful idea took root — that children who experience the wonder of the natural world firsthand will carry that wonder with them for life.

What began as a small after-school program for elementary-age children quickly became something much larger. Children enjoyed following a banana slug, hugging a thousand-year-old redwood, and watching a red-tailed hawk circle in silence overhead. These children discovered something in the forest that no classroom could give them. They discovered that they belonged to something wild and ancient and worth protecting.

Children don’t protect what they don’t know. HOWL exists to make sure they know nature.

From After-School to Summer Camp

As word spread and demand grew, HOWL expanded beyond the after-school hours into full summer programming. The Summer Camp brought children into immersive, multi-day nature experiences- tracking wildlife, learning the names and stories of native plants and animals, building the skills and the confidence that come from time spent outdoors with knowledgeable, caring guides.

Over the years, hundreds of children moved through HOWL’s programs, many of them returning summer after summer, growing from wide-eyed kindergarteners into young naturalists. For many of these children, HOWL was their first and most formative experience of the natural world.

Across the World — Outreach in Tanzania

HOWL’s most remarkable chapter came when its mission crossed an ocean. For five years, HOWL extended its reach to Tanzania, East Africa, working with local youth to connect them to their own extraordinary national parks and wildlife corridors that represent some of the most biodiverse landscapes remaining on Earth.

The work in Tanzania was built on a humbling insight: many young people living in the shadow of these extraordinary wild places had never actually visited them. Distance, cost, and lack of access created a barrier between children and the very landscapes their communities depended on. HOWL worked to bridge that gap, partnering with local educators and community leaders to bring youth into direct, joyful, transformative contact with their natural world.

The Tanzania outreach deepened HOWL’s understanding of its own mission. Across cultures, across continents, across ecosystems as different as a California redwood grove and an East African savanna, the response of children to the living natural world was the same. Wonder. Curiosity. Belonging. The desire to protect what they loved.

Whether it was a child pressing their palm to the bark of a coastal redwood or watching a giraffe move across the horizon, nature made an impact. Pure, unfiltered awe.

A Season of Rest — And a Return

After years of meaningful service, HOWL entered a period of dormancy — a hibernation, as the natural world would call it. The organization’s formal activities paused, its California incorporation lapsed, and for a time HOWL was dormant. But missions rooted in something true do not disappear. They wait.

In 2026, HOWL re-incorporated in Michigan. Now in the forests and fields of Northern Michigan, HOWL returns to its purpose, with twenty years of learning behind it and a whole new landscape of children and wild places before it. The redwoods were our beginning. The forests of the Great Lakes region are our next chapter.