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Our Story

The Teva Learning Center is North America’s foremost Jewish     Environmental Education Institute. Working with Jewish Day Schools, Congregational Schools, Synagogues, camps, and youth groups, Teva’s programs touch the lives of over 6,000 participants of all denominations annually. The Teva Learning Center is a program of Surprise Lake Camp.

This spring, Teva is heading south on a mind-bending adventure to open minds and stretch imaginations, showing communities all along the east coast the power we have as individuals to change the course of history and flip the environmental damage we see around us on its head! And what better way is there to spread this message than on a Topsy-Turvy School Bus that runs on used vegetable-oil collected from restaurants along the way?

On our tour we’ll be building, celebrating, and strengthening the communities we visit through innovative learning methods and grassroots action around Jewish values and renewable energy topics. We’ll stretch mind muscles, dream big, connect to ancient ecological wisdom, and discover creative ways to re-think energy and conservation issues, from worm composting to human-powered bicycle generators.

The Impact

We live in a world where limited resources are overused and quickly discarded, where pollution poisons waterways and the air we breathe, where our food production methods are unsustainable and unhealthy, and where people are losing their connection to the natural world. On this tour we will show people that things don’t have to be this way, and that the power of positive, forward thinking individuals of every age can impact the entire planet.
We’ll be travelling during the season of the Jewish holiday of Purim, a time when our tradition tells us of a young girl who saves a nation through the simple act of asking the king for permission to rally the people together. With us, we’ll be carrying a scroll, reminiscent of the scrolls on which the Purim story is written. On this scroll we’ll be collecting the names of every person we visit, and a one-line description of what that individual is going to do to help the planet. Recycling more, building a compost, or even eating one meat meal fewer a week, look a lot more impressive when you can see that hundreds of other people just like you are doing the same thing!