Life Matters – ABC RN 9am weekdays – wants listeners to send in ‘Shout Outs’ to praise people we know who are doing good things. This is what I’m sending them:

My shout out is for Robyn Yates, teacher librarian at Tinana State School, in Maryborough, Qld.

Robyn’s just won [15/8] this year’s Sustainable Schools Leading the Change Awards* for South East Queensland and the Tweed area. For the finals, Robyn had to do a 2-4min video of her work so she invited all the schools, teachers, kids, parents, businesses, councils, anyone she’s worked with to contribute. I was one of them because Robyn’s work got me travelling ASAP = As Sustainably As Possible, on a train from the Blue Mountains, 1200km/800 miles North to Tinana for their STEAM event – that’s, STEM + Arts – in 2018 and ’19. Through Robyn’s work, I’ve met thousands of inspiring Queensland children and teachers having so much FUN doing what we all should know we’ve got to do anyway. And do we need inspiration.

PS: Tinana was the first Australian school to win an Eco-Schools Green Flag award. E-S is all over the world in >70 countries, with 20million schoolchildren, learning about living sustainably. One important condition is: it must be led by the students. They must want to do this work.

I worked with hundreds of Eco-Schools, back in Northern Ireland, and in 2012, I’d brought ASAP back to Australia and got lots more support; but this is such a big country, progress seemed so slow, and the climate urgency was growing and growing.

I watched the video twice before I noticed something very special