Janani Eswar

Janani is the co-founder of GRIN, a social enterprise that plays to connect children to nature. At the age of 12, Janani stepped out of mainstream education and started homeschooling with her family. In the journey of unlearning, she explored the philosophies of Nai Talim, J. Krishnamurthy, John Holt and many more. She spent the next four years exploring theatre, communication skills, English Literature, Visual Arts and Psychology. She mentored under Dr.Ganesh Babu of FRLHT and Karthikeyan Srinivasan in developing Naturalist studies. At 16, she started working with ArtyPlantz, running programs to inspire people to love plants. Very quickly she realized the power of and need for this simple movement. Delving deeper into this, she found many others on this path. She has mentored under Jon Young and the 8 shields community. With them she put into practice (in Bangalore) many teachings on creating nature-connected communities. In 2014, she spent a year learning and practising Ecopsychology and Deep Ecology in a distance mentoring program with David Key. This work influenced a year long nature connection project she ran in Bhavya Learning Centre. Over the past 6 years, Janani’s work with GRIN has impacted over 1,00,000 individuals aged 1-80+years on nature connection. Amongst other projects, she has been deeply involved with the organizing of Neralu, Bangalore’s tree festival and has taught 2 semesters in the undergraduate course at Azim Premji University. She has presented about GRIN’s work in multiple conferences, including the International Children and Nature conference April 2017.