Pooja Verma
Student Award Recipient for Excellence in Environmental Education
The California Environmental Education Foundation (CEEF) is thrilled to award the 2026 Excellence in Environmental Education Award in the Student category to Pooja Verma for her exceptional innovation and stewardship of the environment. In 2024, with guidance from Nate Ivy, an instructional coach with Fremont Unified School District, Ms. Verma succeeded in co-founding a youth-led environmental nonprofit for Fremont Unified School District students called Eco Innovate which launched two major projects: Birdboxes, and Brushstrokes for the Bay.
Pooja Verma is an exceptional innovator and projects infectious enthusiasm for stewardship of the environment. She is gifted with a unique combination of inspired leadership that cultivates enthusiastic collaboration among her peers and an insatiable appetite to apply cutting-edge technology to benefit the environment. In 2024, with guidance from Nate Ivy, an instructional coach with Fremont Unified School District, Ms. Verma succeeded in co-founding a youth-led environmental nonprofit for Fremont Unified School District students called Eco Innovate. The organization launched two major projects: Birdboxes, and Brushstrokes for the Bay. Pooja credits her biology teacher, Miss Lee, for sparking her interest in ecology and is grateful for all her English teachers who “taught her how to think.”
Brushstrokes for the Bay is a humanities-focused, climate-action project where high school students design and paint environmentally-themed murals at local festivals, community events, and schools across the Bay Area. To date, the team has painted 17+ murals across the community and launched 3+ chapters in the Bay Area. Notable murals include the Oakland Chinatown Street Fest (Figure 1) and Fremont’s LEAF (Local Ecology and Agriculture Fremont) events (Figure 2).
Birdboxes is a STEM-focused, climate-action project, where students have constructed and deployed 15 solar-powered, Wi-Fi-enabled, birdhouses with LED infrared cameras, to conduct remote monitoring of climate-threatened bird populations, such as the California Bluebird and the Western Tree Swallow. And it was Pooja who independently learned how to code a Raspberry Pi, a microprocessor the size of a credit card, to remotely transmit photos of the birds nesting in the boxes to a cloud album every three minutes, 24/7. So far, over 250,000 data points have been collected from the bird boxes and Eco Innovate has shared this information with the California Bluebird Recovery Program to study behavioral trends of endangered bird populations.
As a leader in both her high school STEM club and Eco Innovate, Pooja helped organize and host multiple youth-led camps in science, engineering, and art for younger students to encourage them to adopt eco-friendly habits early in life. Pooja presented in multiple conferences, including the Bay Area Climate Literacy Exchange (Figure 3), and the Silicon Valley Youth Climate Action Conference.
In her junior year, Pooja presented to school board members of the Fremont Unified School District about the development and distribution of the Eco Innovate Birdbox Project. Impressively, the Birdbox Project was featured in the climate column of the Washington Post.
This past May, Pooja especially enjoyed an unexpected conversation with an sixth-grade girl following a Science Sunday Workshop for mothers and daughters where Eco Innovate had hosted a terrarium-making workshop (Figure 4).
The girl shared that she was so inspired by the Birdbox Project that she planned to enter her own water filtration experiment in an upcoming science fair. “That [conversation] was so meaningful [to me],” Pooja exclaimed, “when I see younger students are inspired by our Eco Innovate research; I want them to be aware we are in a living world, and we are connected to the environment…so don’t compromise on your passions if you are interested in climate.”
Although Pooja graduated this Spring and is headed to Stanford University this fall, she is confident that the nonprofits she helped establish will continue to grow and serve their communities. At Stanford, Pooja plans to enroll in a double major in both earth systems and engineering within the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability to pursue her exceptional passion for climate literacy and action.
