The projects it runs, which range from clubs, camps and gardening programs for young people to environmental workshops, sustainability initiatives and learning networks for adults, are richer and more far-reaching than ever before.

But the Board of Directors is considering folding the organisation due to lack of funds.

Cofounder Lisa Siegel said that although CEL has received more than $370,000 in grants since it began 10 years ago, this source of revenue for environmental education organisations has dried up of late.

So CEL has launched a crowdfunding drive to keep itself afloat for a year while it works out how to become financially self-sustaining.

Although it has grown into a “many armed octopus” (according to one of its supporters), for the first five years CEL had a single focus, which was immersive back-to-nature camps for high school students.

Founded by teachers Lisa Siegel and Andrew Turbill in 2007, these Bellingen Environmental Youth Experience (EYE) camps came about at the behest of students who had transferred to Bellingen High from the Chrysalis Steiner school and keenly missed its outdoor program.

“They were beside themselves,” Lisa said. “So I said to Andrew, we can do weekend camps with them. They’re so desperate. There were about 12 kids. And that was around when An Inconvenient Truth came out, and these were smart kids and they loved the bush, they said ‘that’s horrible, let’s do something about climate change’. So then it turned into an environmental youth group.”

An application to the Foundation for Young Australians netted them a substantial kickstarter grant, after the students articulated their goals at a face-to-face meeting with representatives from the philanthropic funding body.

“About 25 kids showed up and talked to these women about how they wanted to get their peers out into the bush, that they feel really good when they’re out in nature, that they’re worried about the planet and they really want to change things,” Lisa said. “And they won themselves $200,000.”

Other grants from various sources followed for other projects – youth leadership, the Bellingen High community garden and Eat the Street.

Then CEL expanded to include adults too, with Deep Ecology workshops, Waste Not Bellingen and the LeaF Festival, which runs in conjunction with the Bello Winter Music Festival.

And as well as connecting people to nature, over the last few years CEL has become an organisation that connects community groups with a shared environmental ethos to each other.

It’s the lead partner in the Bellingen Shire Learning Alliance, the Bellingen Sustainability Centre and the Coffs Coast Regional Science Hub.

So it’s quite an octopus, but as Lisa says, they can’t rely on grant funding any more, and “the octopus needs a stable head”, someone who is paid, someone who can figure out viable income streams.

“We’ve had wonderful people doing volunteer work, but then they get a job,” Lisa said. “We need some concentrated effort.”

The $30,000 CEL is trying to raise via https://www.givenow.com.au/helpcelsurviveandthrive will enable the organisation to support its current projects and employ someone part-time to plan its long-term sustainability.

That way, it can continue its mission – to “educate, inspire and empower”.