Our Story
Green Steps was founded in 2017 in Shanghai, a city with 27 million inhabitants, where we have been living with our families for many years. We felt the need to instill environmental awareness into urban residents and to help the younger generation develop their connection with the outdoors, nurturing their curiosity and respect for the environment. Ever since then our mission is connecting people with nature.
We started by designing and facilitating experiential outdoor activities. We continued by training Nature Guides and now want to bring our vision to the next level with a platform which connects nature educators around the world and empowers them with best practices of outdoor learning. What we know, we love. What we love, we protect.
21st century solutions are global: that’s why we decided to register a non-profit organization in Europe to link our efforts in China with people from our home countries.
We are a team of Nature Guides with corporate backgrounds and diverse interests. Check out our website to meet everybody: https://www.greensteps.me/about/
The Problem
Sir Ken Robinson described our situation with utter clarity in one of the most viewed TED talks ever made: we face both an environmental crisis and a human resource crisis. One of the world’s most prominent educators has called for a revolution in education to solve both at once.
The Solution
Modern neuroscience tells us that habits are easiest and most lastingly formed during early childhood. Green Steps harvests this neurological window of opportunity to form sound habits of environmental mindfulness and our curriculum builds on this foundation throughout later development stages.
We know from experience that transformation is only possible when people enjoy the process. Much consumption is compensation for unfulfilled emotional needs and a meaningless life. Our activities are fun, instill purpose and guide young and old students towards deep and authentic satisfaction.
Our digital learning platform connects students, guides and communities in a gamified experience to share best practices of experiential outdoor learning.
Our Principles
- Outdoors: addiction to digital devices and urbanization keeps us indoors. We strengthen empathy towards the planet and other life forms by spending most time outdoors.
- Contribution: more and more have the means to live, but fewer and fewer have meaning in their life. We facilitate and design deeply motivating experiences.
- Production: we respond to the environmental crisis through production instead of consumption, because this is the only way to reduce waste in the long run.
- Craftsmanship: we answer to the challenges of labor market automation by cherishing manual work, farming, and gardening.
- Experiential: we implement our activities in real learning communities and engage all our senses to make learning engaging and impactful.
- Personalized: individual learning types and learning windows are of greater importance than industrial assembly-belt education.
- Trans-generational: we break up the year-of-birth classroom structures and facilitate our activities either for age brackets or in a community involving, in particular, our elders.
- Global: we integrate Western and Eastern best practices of learning with the aim to provide a curriculum valid on a global scale.
Our Mission
A good teacher needs time to observe and respond to a child’s needs. We, therefore, aim to decrease the teacher-student ratio to 1:6 and increase the number of Nature Guides through our standardized training.
Increasing the number of adults in teaching positions requires a disruption of current qualification standards. We want to empower economically and ecologically disadvantaged communities with our products and services.
We have therefore set for 2020 three central objectives by which we measure our impact and performance: the number of participants in our activities, the number of trained Nature Guides and the number of new locations, where our curriculum is implemented.
Your Contribution
- Donate. Help us to finance 10 new nature learning communities in economically or ecologically disadvantaged regions.
- Learn. Board the Green Steps ARK and start your own journey to connect with Mother Earth.
- Do you believe in our mission? Spread the word.
