NACC Leadership Biography

Marc Veekamp

Marc Veekamp is a specialist on nature education and young children. In the Netherlands he is a leading person on this subject. He is involved in many innovative projects all over his country. In his work for young children he believes in the importance of the connection between educators and nature. Once connected, people like educators, pedagogues, parents and teachers are able to take their responsibility to accompany young children in their exploration of nature.

The work of Marc Veekamp is related to day care centers in the Netherlands. He carries out workshops, trainings and coaching projects and also lectures on many different occasions. He is author of many practical manuals for pedagogy and articles about his work regularly appear in Dutch journals. Now he is the leader of a project which works out a more detailed vision of nature education and young children. For this "Groen is Gras" project he recently travelled to Scandinavia and visited some of their special forest kindergartens.

His company, Veldwerk Nederland, is operating nationally and internationally in environmental education for more than 30 years. Its core business is to involve people in issues concerning environment and sustainable development, by focusing on educational processes and how environmental issues interrelate with society.

Personally Marc Veekamp is strongly motivated by the positive way nature affects him. He grew up in a small town where he often played outdoors, building canals and digging huts at a brook side. He started his professional career as a landscape architect, but after a couple of years he decided to educate himself as a teacher. After a few years teaching children in primary schools he entered Nature Education. For more than eight years, he has been working as a nature-educator for early childcare in kindergartens.

Marc entered the NACC leadership group in 2008. He is strongly motivated to extend the world-wide network in his country and in Europe. The NACC network in the Netherlands starts in 2009. The coming years he is building up the European network together with Helle Nebelong (Denmark) and Claire Warden (Scotland).