Green Steps - About - The team behind Green Steps

We activate green spaces in urban and suburban areas to connect you with nature. We make these areas more accessible and exciting through guided and self-guided routes that provide fun information about our home and bioregion. Repeated exploration of nature strengthens community, creates a sense of responsibility and a new understanding of what and where home is.

We can only love what we know. We can only protect what we love.

Green Steps was founded in 2017 in Shanghai, a city of 27 million people where we lived for many years. We saw the need to raise environmental awareness in urbanites and save children from the spreading nature deficit disorder (Richard Loev, 2005). Since then, our mission has been to innovatively connect people of all ages with nature.

If China can teach us one thing, it is the impact of a large population on the environment. As native Europeans, this perspective has left a lasting mark on us, and in the face of a growing global population, has pushed us to act. From China for the world. For the world, hand in hand with China.

We began by planning and implementing experiential walks in city parks for elementary and primary school-aged children. After leading hundreds of children at a time, some with parents and teachers, into Shanghai's green spaces over a period of two years, we began training Nature Guides. We have been able to train close to a 100 Nature Guides so far and made our three-level Nature Guide training in 2023 available in an online and hybrid format.

At the end of 2019, we set up a location in Europe and develop in St. Pölten the Mobile Campus 4.0 as a gloabally scalable format of environmental education. It helps schools and day care facilities to take children and teens aged 6 to18 in an engaging and playful manner into deep nature. In parallel, we develop a web app that maps the Mobile Campus 4.0 in a digital twin and transforms nature experience into a dual game for participants that evolves both in the natural space and online.

With this current phase of our work, we are actively contribute to the development of the Internet of Nature (IoN), pioneering the educational application of IoN. Our ambition is to provide a decentralized and global solution for transforming education towards ecosystem understanding and the unfolding of human potential.

Since 2020 we are an official Erasmus+ coordinating organization for the coordination of youth encounters; since 2021 we are an ESC hosting organization welcoming volunteers in St. Pölten for 12 months to train as Nature Guides and spread their insights back to their home countries. Learn more about Green Steps as an ERASMUS+ and European Solidarity Corps organization on the European Youth Portal.