1984 to 2025
Every Report We Have
Four decades of the work, set down for the record.
What SFS studied, built, and made possible.
The Record
An Honest Accounting
An annual report is the most candid thing an institution publishes: a yearly accounting to the students and faculty who do the work, the trustees who steward it, and the donors and partners who make it possible. Gathered here are the reports The School for Field Studies issued since 1984, from a young organization still inventing the field semester to a school with field research centers around the world.
Read in sequence, they tell the same story the program catalogs do, from a different vantage. The catalogs are what we said we believed; the annual reports are what we actually did with the year in front of us: the programs we ran, the research we conducted, the centers we opened, the local communities we collaborated with, and the individuals who supported it all.
Not every year survives in print, and the collection here is simply what we have. Read together, the reports that remain trace four decades of a single, stubborn conviction: that the best way to understand the world is to live and work inside it.
1980s
The earliest reports on record, written only a few years after our founding. These are the years we invent the twelve-week field semester and put down our first permanent roots, a small operation carrying an outsized argument about how science should be taught.
1990s
A decade of staying put. The reports track research centers settling into the landscapes and communities around them, and the long-term relationships that became the school’s signature.
2000s
A maturing institution takes stock. These reports speak in a more deliberate voice: a quarter-century of alumni behind us, a widening map ahead, and a growing vocabulary of systems, stewardship, and climate.
2010s
Expansion. New centers open across more of the world and applied research moves to the center of our purpose; the reports of these years find us hitting our stride.
2020s
One report so far this decade. After a six-year gap, the 2025 edition picks the record back up: we are a school of twelve centers, still making the case we started with, now to a far larger world.
