At Green Light Trust, we have two exciting and inspiring leaders, who bring the wealth of their experience into this original Scandinavian initiative.
Hana Jones
Hana has been working as a freelance trainer with Green Light Trust since 1993, and qualified as a Forest School Leader at Level 3 in 2003. As part of her vision to bring children back into nature and to ensure we have caretakers for our planet in the future, she has been training adults to become Forest School Leaders since Green Light Trust became an OCN Accredited Forest School Training Provider in 2005. She learnt the practical and spiritual skills of wilderness living with Tom Brown Jnr. at the Tracker School in USA. Hana has been studying with Black Wolf Jones, an elder and medicine teacher of the Ojibwe tribe since 1997, and is currently part of the Instructor team for Native Awareness, a school that teaches "Earth-Living" skills alongside the ancient philosophical and spiritual traditions of living in harmony with nature.
Hana's career with Green Light Trust began with taking a drama based workshop into school that focussed on the strong link that Green Light has with the people of the Hunstein Range, Papua New Guinea. She subsequently spent 6 weeks in that rainforest, learning from the people there and supporting them to hold back the threat of big logging companies.
Hana has over 25 years of experience in personal development processes through the healing, physical balancing and group work that she facilitates.
Rich Sylvester
Rich combines tutoring the Forest School courses at Green Light with his work as a storyteller and Green Space Guide. He works regularly in schools, in the Royal Parks in London, and at public events such as festivals, Tree Days and Frog Days for a range of environmental and community organisations. Rich has been working at Green Light since 1994 and has made 3 trips to stay in villages in Papua New Guinea as part of Green Light's long-running cultural exchange Programme.
Rich grew up in Highland Perthshire and spent most of his early years exploring different levels of wilderness.
As a Forest School tutor, Rich has been delivering Level 1 and Level 3 courses since 2005. He has run Forest Schools sessions in various settings, from an Early years centre in East London to Suffolk woodlands with excluded and disaffected teenagers. As a trainer and facilitator Rich has run workshops for a wide range of environmental Organisations, including INSET for the Woodland Trust 'Nature Detectives' programme, and Storytelling for the 'International Diploma in Botanic Gardens Education' at RBG Kew.
Alongside environmental work Rich has a keen interest in local history and has co-ordinated a local history project in partnership with three primary schools. He has also worked as an International linking officer for Christian Aid and a UK Regional Organiser for WWF. In 2008 he completed an M.A. in Public History at Ruskin College Oxford. He is a member of the Society for Storytelling, Equity and the Association for Heritage Interpretation.