I Am Soil: Youth-led Earth Literacy in Stroud to the World

We believe life skills cannot be separated from the soil, water, and biology they depend on - and that young people are not the audience for this work, but its co-authors. Through hands-on lessons, workshops, and partnerships with schools and community organisations, we build curriculum that is rigorous, context-based, and rooted in care for the self, the community, and the planet. Money raised in this campaign will go directly to the design, piloting, and global sharing of I Am Soil - a youth-led, arts-based learning education program and curriculum that re-sensitises young people to the living ground beneath them, and the ecosystems that depend on it.

Where We Come From: Voices of Tomorrow

I Am Soil grows out of Voices of Tomorrow: The Youth Creative Futures Project — our global, youth-led 2D exhibition launched on World Children’s Day that has amplified the creative visions of more than 300 young people and educators across 25+ countries, including refugee, marginalised, and low-resource communities. Through art, poetry, music, and design, young participants have moved from silence to storytelling, from spectators to changemakers.

The project taught us what is possible when young people are trusted with the tools. In Afghanistan, young women joined our art and storytelling sessions and used drawing to express hopes for education and peace - some sharing their work publicly for the first time, despite the risks of speaking at all. In Mindanao, youth designed community murals later presented to local officials. In the Visayas, young facilitators ran art-for-peace activities with preschoolers. In the UK, CFL led workshops where students turned classroom learning into collaborative artworks shared across schools.

The lesson was clear: art is not decoration around an issue. It is the way a generation finds the language to meet it.

The Problem: A Generation Estranged from the Ground

I Am Soil is a partnership with SoilTribes and ZeroDig Alliance, whose no-dig farming methods protect and rebuild soil from the ground up. They hold the agricultural practice and research in their local farms in the United Kingdom (Stroud) and in France (Bretagne); Curriculum for Life hold the torch for youth advocacy and creative education. Together, we are testing what happens when regenerative soil work and youth-led storytelling are designed as one piece of work, not two.

In our early workshops on soil, we kept surfacing across every context: at first, young people believe soil is something to avoid. Something to be washed off. Something dirty. Something that has nothing to do with them.

This is not their fault. It is the result of a culture that has built itself on top of soil while teaching almost nothing about it. Most young people today can name more apps and brands than soil organisms. They can navigate a screen before they can read the living layer that feeds them three times a day. Aside from high school biology, soil is invisible in nearly every standard curriculum, even as the systems that depend on it - food, water, climate, health, economy - come under growing strain. That silence is not neutral. It is how a generation grows up estranged from the very thing keeping it alive.

The Solution: I Am Soil

I Am Soil is a youth-led, arts-centered curriculum that re-sensitises young people to soil - and through soil, to the whole web of life it holds up. It is built on the same model that made Voices of Tomorrow work: young people co-design every lesson, and creative practice is the doorway in. Across weaved art and science workshops, learners move from observation to action. They dig into the ground where they live. They learn to read texture, colour, smell, and life. They meet the food web beneath their feet: the fungi threading through roots, the worms turning death into fertility, the bacteria older than language. They look into the histories that shaped their local land - who farmed it, what used to grow there, and what no longer does. They compost. They measure change across a season.

And they make. Music written from field recordings of soil organisms. Dance pieces choreographed to the rhythms of decomposition. Murals, poems, sound installations, photographs. Each module pairs a practical soil skill with a creative act - because we have learned that what young people make, they remember; and what they remember, they protect.

How We Regenerate

I Am Soil is not a lecture. It is a curriculum of care. Around the central thread of soil, we weave the wider life skills young people are rarely taught: cooking with what grows nearby, budgeting for a household that buys real food, understanding the supply chains that decide what ends up on a plate, building simple tools, resolving conflict in shared growing spaces, sitting with elders who carry land knowledge, and learning how to act in a time of ecological change.

Aiming to reach every country in the world, the curriculum is being created multigenerationally - shaped by youth, tested in classrooms and community spaces, and informed by farmers, educators, soil scientists, and artists. It will be released freely, so any teacher, parent, or community group can pick it up and adapt it to their own ground.

Tracking Impact

We will track I Am Soil through both quantitative and qualitative measures: the number of young people impacted and (de)influenced, schools and community organisations partnered with, lessons piloted and adapted, and creative works produced and submitted. We will measure shifts in young people's relationship to soil before and after participation - moving from "dirty" and "nothing to do with me" toward language of care, curiosity, and stewardship.

But the deeper impact stretches beyond numbers. We will document, in young people's own words and creative work, what changes when they begin to know the ground they stand on. We will gather the artworks, the music, the writing - and carry them into the spaces where decisions about land, food, and education are made.

Our Long-Term Ambition: From Curriculum to Policy

We are not building I Am Soil to sit on a shelf. Our ambition is to carry this work into policy - to make soil literacy, ecological care, and youth voice part of how education is designed, not optional extras at its edge. Building on Voices of Tomorrow's partnerships with UNESCO's Futures Literacy Lab, Ormiston Trust and our growing network of ambassadors across 25+ countries, we will use I Am Soil to make the case - through the work of young people themselves - that the skills of living should be at the centre of every child's education.

Our Experience

CFL and the Voices of Tomorrow team bring a track record of delivering youth-led, multi-country creative work in places others find difficult to reach - from Afghanistan to the Philippines to the UK. We have built the partnerships, the methodologies, and the trust networks needed to do this well. I Am Soil is the next chapter: turning the voice we have helped young people find toward the ground that holds us all.

Soil is where life begins. It is also, we believe, where this generation's curriculum should begin.