Meet Sharon Danks @sdanks Green Schoolyards America

On this episode of PopHealth Week our guest is Sharon Danks the Founder and Executive Director of Green Schoolyards America, a national nonprofit based in Berkeley, California. Green Schoolyards America’s mission is to inspire and enable communities to enrich their school grounds and use them to improve children’s wellbeing, learning and play while contributing to the ecological health and resilience of their cities.

Since 1999, her professional work and passion have focused on transforming school grounds into vibrant public spaces that reflect and enhance local ecology, engage the community, and nurture children as they learn and play. Her work is now focused on scaling up the green schoolyard movement and integrating school ground design, management and use with green urban infrastructure. An accomplished schoolyard designer, researcher and speaker, Sharon has traveled the world to study hundreds of school grounds and share best practices. She is the author of "Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Transformation" (New Village Press, 2010), and co-founder of the International School Grounds Alliance and Bay Tree Design. Sharon has served on California’s statewide Environmental Literacy Task Force, and was honored to become an Ashoka Fellow in 2017. She holds master’s degrees in landscape architecture and city planning from UC Berkeley, and a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University.

Enjoy!

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