Your Beans Support Kids, Creeks, and Wild Salmon!
May/June Beans for Bags Spotlight: Northwest Salmon Coalition
Thank you for bringing a bag and dropping a bean in the jar. That small choice adds up to something real. For 35 years, the North Olympic Salmon Coalition has worked in a similar way to bring wild salmon back to local rivers. Tree by tree, acre by acre, kid by kid. And yes, a big part of that work happens in classrooms through two flagship educational programs.
Each year, we help elementary students raise baby coho salmon in their school through Salmon in the Schools. Kids watch the eggs hatch. They feed them as they grow, helping to keep the tank clean, and learning about salmon lifecycle and habitat from the experts. After four months, everyone piles in the bus and takes a field trip to a local creek where they release their charges into the wild.
Real Learning Real Work takes middle-schoolers outside to learn about the science behind habitat restoration, giving them the skills necessary to envision, design, and implement their own salmon habitat restoration projects. Through a series of field trips and classroom lessons, students assess habitat quality at a local waterway, define an engineering problem, and implement their restoration plan.
In our 35 years of operations, we’ve reached over 24,000 kids in these and other activities. There are mature tree stands that exist today that were planted by these students over the years. Hands-on learning about local ecology holds moments they carry with them for the rest of their lives.
Your support means a lot, now more than ever. In 2025, the state legislature eliminated the grant that paid for most of the costs for these outdoor leaning programs. We are asking our community to join us on this journey and close that gap and keep the programs funded over the next few years. Bean by bean, dollar by dollar, we get there together.
For the future, we are daring to lean into the future. There are schools and kids we haven’t reached yet, and it drives us. Despite these recent funding challenges, we're dedicated to ensuring our outdoor education programs are available to every school in the North Olympic Peninsula that wants it.
Every kid deserves to know their home the way wild salmon do. Your beans help us get there.
THANK YOU!
References for deeper dives:
https://nosc.org/our-work/education/
https://nosc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/NOSC-Community-Report-2025-FINAL.pdf
https://nosc.org/website/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/2023-24-Annual-Report-FINAL.pdf
