Sylvia Medina

Sylvia Medina's work with children began with an animal in trouble. In Botswana, she encountered an orphaned and injured baby elephant, and the experience inspired her to create the Environmental Hero Stories, the books at the heart of Green Kids Club. Medina, the organisation's President, is an environmental engineer, an entrepreneur, an author and a conservation advocate. Environmental education, she believes, can begin with something as simple, and as powerful, as a story.

The books are built to do more than entertain. They feature endangered animals and real conservation stories, with science sections, photographs and the organisations working to protect each species. The aim is to help children understand both sides of the picture: the challenges facing wildlife, and the ways they themselves can make a difference. A young reader meets the problem and, alongside it, the people already working to solve it.

In her first Xraised episode, Medina also discussed Green Kids Club's partnership with the reforestation platform Evertreen, which adds a real-world dimension to the lessons in her books. The aim is to turn environmental storytelling into hands-on climate action for children. Trees are a natural fit for the stories she tells. They provide shade and shelter for wildlife and support entire ecosystems, which places them at the centre of the relationship between animals, people and the environment that her books explore.

One of the questions put to her goes to the heart of it. How do you make a tree feel real to a child who may be thousands of miles away from where it is growing? A planted tree is easy to announce and harder to feel connected to, particularly for a young reader. Part of the answer lies in where Medina wants the partnership to go next.

She would like it to involve children directly: through tree-planting activities of their own, through fundraising initiatives, and through projects that connect children at home with trees being planted in places such as Africa. In each case, the lesson on the page is tied to something growing in the ground, and the child is a participant rather than a spectator.

Some of it has begun. Green Kids Club's nonprofit arm, Love the Wild Foundation, supports a village in Kenya, where local children are already taking part in tree-planting efforts. It is a working example of the connection her books set out to teach, between children, animals, plants and the places they share.

At the heart of Medina's approach is a simple progression. When children understand the connection between animals, plants, people and their environment, a story can become a conversation, and a conversation can become action. The Evertreen partnership gives that progression a practical next step, and her ambition now is to let more children take it for themselves, from the page to the planting.