Laura Honda

Wildlife Educator

Laura is a Wildlife Educator with Project Coyote’s Keeping It Wild program, educating today’s youth to care for Wild Nature and to advocate for positive change in their communities. Laura won Project Coyote’s Wildlife Educator of the Year Award in 2019 for her excellence in teaching young people about peaceful coexistence with wild carnivores and the importance of fostering respect and compassion for wildlife, and for contributing to students’ environmental and scientific literacy. Laura has inspired her students to write letters to the editor and to testify (writing their own speeches) at California Fish and Game Commission meetings in support of successful efforts to ban wildlife killing contests and to prohibit the trapping of bobcats statewide.

During her almost three decades of teaching, Laura has earned several awards, including California Science Teacher of the Year Award from the California Science Teachers Association, the National Earth Apple Award from Alliance to Save Energy, the Terwilliger Environmental Award and the Marin Humane Teacher of the Year Award. She has a BA in environmental studies from Sonoma State University and her teaching credential has an environmental component.

Laura established the Green Team at her school. Her students work to make their school zero-waste, energy efficient, and water-wise; encourage fellow students to recycle and compost; and maintain a wildlife-friendly habitat in their schoolyard.

Laura became aware of the cruelty that animals endure when she was 12 years old after learning about steel-jaw leghold traps. She started a petition to stop the use of these horrific traps, launching her activism on behalf of animals. She has dedicated her life to teaching, and weaves environmental education into her classroom every day. She believes that nothing is more important than to inspire our youth to care about our precious wildlife and their habitat, and to speak up and advocate for their protection.