Manice

Education Center

Where New York kids experience the Great Outdoors

Since its opening in 1981, Christodora’s Manice Education Center (MEC), located in Florida, Massachusetts, in the Savoy Mountain State Forest, has provided over 25,000 students with outdoor, leadership, and environmental experiences. MEC offers an opportunity to be immersed in the wilderness — to climb mountains, paddle down a river, and gaze at the Milky Way.

Goals of the Manice Education Center

The primary goals of the center are to:

  • Introduce campers to the world of nature, stimulating their enthusiasm for learning in the outdoors.

  • Nurture sensitivity to and understanding of the human place within nature systems.

  • Develop camper’s capacity for self-reliance, group cooperation, and camping and educational skills.

  • Involve campers as full, responsible members of the camp community, encouraging feelings of community spirit and harmony.

Meet the Director

Anna Hernandez-Krol returns to Christodora as Director of the Manice Education Center after serving as an Outdoor Educator and Wilderness Program Supervisor in previous years. With a combined educational background in social work and arboriculture, Anna's unique career path includes swim coaching and upscale landscaping management on high-end estates on eastern Long Island. A born and raised New Yorker, Anna looks forward to merging her love of people and nature as director, and showing her staff and students there is just as much hustle and bustle in a forest as there is in midtown.

What’s your favorite kind of bird and why?

My two favorite bird species are associated with fond memories. 

  • The Carolina Wren-Thryothorus ludovicianus. I had one live on my bedroom windowsill for months and we developed a peaceful coexistence. 

  • The Cedar Waxwing- Bombycilla cedrorum. Our staff and students at MEC have witnessed how they like to follow our canoes down the Battenkill and CT Rivers :)

Carolina Wren
Thryothorus ludovicianus

Cedar Waxwing
Bombycilla cedrorum

More About Manice

Manice is located in Western Massachusetts in the heart of the Berkshires. The Manice campus is surrounded by 150 acres of private forest, rolling hills, ponds, waterfalls, and a vast network of trails.