Held in Purgatory: Karen Cowe & Craig Strang on Ten Strands, AB 2158, and Joyful Persistence

A bill with unanimous, bipartisan support at every stage still didn't make it through — what Ten Strands' thirteen-year arc teaches about building something that outlasts a single vote.

I went to outdoor science school in sixth grade — a week away from home, in the mountains, with the rest of my class. I don't remember being especially excited about it beforehand. I remember cabins that smelled like cedar, a night hike where someone made us turn off our flashlights, and coming home talking about morteros like I'd personally discovered them. Years later, I put my own kid on a very similar bus, to a very similar program, in fifth grade, and watched him come home just as changed.

Karen (third from the right) and Craig (right) presenting on Ten Strands work.

Neither of those weeks happened because outdoor learning was written into California law. They happened because a specific school, in a specific year, had the funding and the will to make it available — to me, and later to my son. Not every school does. Not every kid gets that bus.

This week I talked with Karen Cowe and Craig Strang. Karen is the founding CEO of Ten Strands, the California nonprofit that's spent thirteen years — as Karen puts it — being "the source of the grease and the glue" between dozens of organizations all working toward the same goal. Craig spent 32 years at the Lawrence Hall of Science before going independent, and has worked alongside Karen since 2015.

Craig sharing a Sea Hare with a group of students in July of 1996 on the California coast.

Craig's own origin story flips mine on its head: he almost didn't take the course that set his entire career in motion. He thought it was a scam — five units for a beach field trip once a week. He wheedled his way into an upper-division class as a freshman. By the end of it, he'd discovered "I liked education and sharing the stuff as much as I liked learning it." That was almost fifty years ago.

Ten Strands' list of work is long — the EEI curriculum, the California Blueprint for Environmental Literacy, SB 720 – California's Environmental Principles and Concepts, the national COVID-19 Outdoor Learning Initiative that reached over a thousand people in a single webinar. But the thread through all of it is what led to Assembly Bill 2158, the Outdoor Learning and Environmental Literacy Act of 2026: a genuine cross-sector coalition of environmental educators, pediatricians, epidemiologists, and mental health practitioners who'd never worked together before, all saying the same thing — kids need more time outdoors.

The bill asked for three things: language in Education Code recognizing outdoor learning as a legitimate instructional practice, state guidance for schools on how to do it well, and funding for a statewide pilot. Karen and Craig wrote it so the pilot could be surgically removed if needed — "if we had to take a pair of scissors and cut it off, the whole rest of it would still hang together." That instinct turned out to matter: on advice that the governor doesn't sign bills mixing policy with budget, they cut the pilot themselves.

Here's the moment that stopped me: the bill passed the Assembly Education Committee 9-0. Assembly Appropriations, unanimous. The Assembly floor, 77-0. The Senate Education Committee, unanimous, on consent. And then, in Senate Appropriations, it was held in the suspense file — what Craig calls "limbo, purgatory, something where bills go to die." Not because anyone opposed it. Because of where it sat in a budget year.

The Ten Strands team together outdoors. Craig (in the Ten Strands Logo) in the bottom left corner and a quote "Nothing that either of us has ever done in our careers has come easily."

Craig's response to that, three weeks out, wasn't despair: "Nothing that either Karen or I have ever done in our careers has come easily... if you don't have the stamina to stay in the game, you never get anything done, because none of it's easy."

Find ten minutes today and look at one place — a park, a schoolyard, a five-minute walk from wherever you're reading this — that a kid in your life could actually get to. That's the unit AB 2158 was built around. It doesn't need legislation to happen this week.

Listen to this week's episode of Hopeful by Nature wherever you get your podcasts. Part 2 — on the Meta settlement and what comes next — drops October 5th.

— Scott

Wildward Institute supports organizations, educators, and parents building meaningful relationships between young people and the outdoors. Learn more at wildwardinstitute.net.

Resources mentioned in this episode: tenstrands.org · caoutdoorlearning.org

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