NLI provides design assistance, design review, and professional development resources to private and public institutions that offer formal and nonformal education and cultural services to children. NLI works with community partners, including landscape architects, to create model, research-based, ecologically viable outdoor settings. NLI believes that effective design must be a community-based process that engages all relevant stakeholders in developing a project mission, vision, and design objectives to support consensus-based design solutions.

Projects are typically concentrated, short-duration efforts that focus on specific design issues or involve a single aspect of a program (e.g., design assistance, evaluation, professional development or policy initiative).