HER WORK
Eshadi’s work is a quiet revolution stitched together by questions the classroom never allowed her to ask. It is an ongoing rebellion against the ordinary, the rigid, and the uninspired. She was once a child who never stopped wondering, even while feeling trapped in a system that punished curiosity. For a while, she almost lost herself to it. Now, she’s making sure no child has to.
Schoolyard Scientists
This is where the wild return. Funded by the National Geographic Society, Schoolyard Scientists is a national movement Eshadi designed to rewire how children and teachers see the land around them. It began with a question: What if every schoolyard became a hub for conservation?
Now, in seven provinces across Sri Lanka, students document the plants, insects, birds, and fungi that live right beside them, many for the first time. They don’t learn science from a blackboard. They learn it with their knees in the soil, their eyes wide open, and their hands full of stories. This is a movement to build empathy of children towards nature.
Photo Credit: Rukmal Rathnayake
Schoolyard Scientists at Sinharaja Forest Reserve holding the National Geographic Society flag
Changing Policy with the Heart
Eshadi has sat in global negotiation rooms at COP15 and COP16. She has spoken at the events at GEF Assembly and national biodiversity dialogues. But she doesn’t walk into these spaces to tick a youth box. She walks in with stories from Indigenous communities, children, and educators who never get invited to the table.
Her work with the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP) in Sri Lanka, alongside global frameworks like the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework is grounded in one principle: Policies mean nothing if the people they’re written for are excluded.
Photo Credit: Daniel Murillo
Eshadi Mendis, Global Youth Biodiversity Network-GYBN at COP15 side event, “Walking the talk towards a transformative Global Biodiversity Framework” organised by Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework . EU Support and Expertise France, noted that “Transformative education is the key to changing our behaviors and teaching both our generation and the future ones how to change our consumption patterns and how to be empathetic with nature”
Rewilding Education
She was an engineer once. Now, she designs the kind of learning she wishes someone had created for her, field-based, wonder-filled, rooted in empathy, not just evidence. She builds story-driven curricula. She trains educators to slow down and listen. She teaches children to document the world, not just pass a test.
Education is broken, not because teachers have failed, but because imagination was removed from the syllabus. She’s here to bring it back.
Photo Credit: Rasika Silva
Eshadi designed and organised “Schoolyard Stories: Exhibition and Storytelling Festival” which also curated various discussions such as panel discussions on “Schoolyard as a Hub for Conservation”, “Bridging Classrooms and Corporates: Educator Spotlight and Panel Discussion”. This was supported by the National Geographic Society and Dilmah Conservation.
Youth Aren’t “The Future, They Are The Pulse
Through the Global Youth Biodiversity Network, she has led youth consultations, co-created international campaigns, and built intergenerational bridges. She doesn’t work for youth, she works with them, in classrooms, in forests, on policy papers, and in the global stage.
She believes in young people who lead with questions, not resumes. Her job is to protect their fire from a world that constantly tries to water it down.
Her work doesn’t live in one place. It lives in classrooms and forest trails, in global halls and forgotten villages, in policy drafts and children’s sketches. If you follow the thread long enough, you’ll find it always leads back to one thing: the urgent need to feel, before we fix.
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Eshadi Mendis 