Meet Founder Sarah Besse

This story begins long before I ever knew about forest kindergartens. At the New York City public elementary school I attended, our recess area was blacktop, but a London plane tree grew just beyond the chain-link fence, its branches reaching into the schoolyard. I remember children pulling leaves from those branches so they could hold them, feel them, and play with them. They were literally pulling nature toward themselves, an instinct researchers call biophilia, the deeply human need for connection with living beings.