Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden and BGCI are partnering for this year’s (2020-2021) Fairchild Global Challenge: Unsung Plant Scientists. This global challenge is open to all school age learners and celebrates underrepresented plant scientists.

To celebrate botanists with different perspectives from diverse backgrounds, the challenge will ask students to create a trading card that showcases the life and inspiring work of a chosen botanist. Find out more about the challenge and how to enter here.

On Thursday 18th March BGCI and Fairchild hosted a one hour event to launch the Challenge and to discuss why diversity and representation within the plant conservation sector is so important. This session introduced the challenge and included four guest speakers sharing their experiences about why the work of botanic gardens is so important to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and how we can improve access in plant sciences to underrepresented groups. The speakers were:

• Princess Basma bint Ali – Founder of The Royal Botanic Garden of Jordan
• Martin Cadena Salgado – United Nations Development Programme
• Judy Ling Wong – President of the Black Environment Network
• Gioia Massa – Plant Scientist at NASA’s Veggie Programme

To augment this project, we are launching a series of videos through the Fairchild Challenge YouTube page where we will be posting short, prerecorded videos of current plant scientists discussing their work and their journey to achieving these goals. If you or someone you know may be interested in submitting a video, please review the attached guidelines and complete the registration form.

We are excited to offer this project and look forward to witnessing the long-term impacts of students seeing themselves in the many fields of plant science. Please share details of the launch with those who may be interested in participating in these opportunities to increase visibility of underrepresented groups in botany.

For more information please contact Helen Miller.