Building a community of nature educators in Bengaluru

A game of spring bingo is underway at Cubbon Park on a pleasant Sunday morning. The players fan across the park's lush lawns and thickets of trees, dodging other Sunday regulars (walkers, joggers, readers, skaters, dogs, lovers ambling hand-in-hand) as they attempt to identify specific things in the park: new leaves, flowering trees, spiderlings, edible leaves and birdsong. Once they cross out most of the items on their respective bingo cards, they sit in a circle under a large tree, ready to share insights and meet other like-minded people.

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Now in its 10th edition, this monthly event is a nature educators' meet-up, an informal convening of people in or interested in the nature learning space. These meets, an initiative of the Nature Conservation Foundation's Nature Classrooms, is a space "where people can feel free to come, share their work, collaborate, network and give nature education a voice," says Priyanka Prakash, a project manager at Nature Classrooms. According to nature educator and ecologist Vena Kapoor who founded and heads Nature Classrooms, an initiative to link everyday learning and education to the natural world, this idea of an informal meet-up was seeded from a casual conversation during a team meeting. "My colleagues and I were discussing how many people reach out to us, saying that they are also interested in nature education and asking if they could meet us," she says. This casual conversation led to them thinking that it would be "nice for people from the nature education space to catch up occasionally, just to discuss each other's work, see if we want to share resources, figure out what is happening in this space and help each other."