David J. Smith is a classroom teacher with over 25 years experience teaching middle and high school English, geography and social studies. He achieved national recognition for his unique method of teaching seventh graders to draw maps of the entire world from memory, now published as a highly successful curriculum, “Mapping the World by Heart”. In 1992, Smith won the U.S. Department of Education’s “A+ for Breaking the Mold” Award for his work. Since 1992, he has been a full-time educational consultant, giving lectures and workshops on informational technologies, geography and global issues to teachers, parents, student groups and others throughout the United States and in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America.#Time magazine, NBC’s Today Show, the L.A. Times and the Associated Press, among others, have acknowledged Smith and the success of his curriculum. Smith has also written articles for The New York Times Education Life section, “The International Educator” and “The World Paper”. #Through his work with teachers, Smith developed the idea of creating a realistic picture of the world that would be understandable and accessible to young people. By imagining a village where each inhabitant represented 62 million individuals, David was able to pare Earth’s population down to a village of 100 people. The result is If the World Were a Village: A Book about the World’s People.#Upon shrinking the world’s population, proportions and relationships become more meaningful, statistics more manageable. Based on published figures, If the World Were a Village reveals some startling disparities. For instance, in the world village, there are 38 school-aged villagers — but of the 38 only 31 of them attend school and only 24 of them have enough food to eat. The world keeps changing and growing, and the data in the book has been kept current; between 2002 and 2014, it has been updated 23 times.#Smith believes that this book promotes “world-mindedness”, which is an attitude, an approach to life. At a time when parents and educators are looking to help children gain a better understanding of the world’s peoples and their ways of life, If the World Were a Village is a unique and objective resource. Through the surprising statistics and Smith’s tips on fostering a world view, children are encouraged to embrace the bigger picture and to establish their own place in the global village.#David Smith was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He has lived in England, Hawaii and Oregon, but now lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

Bestselling author Katie Smith Milway, whose CitizenKid books One Hen, The Good Garden, Mimi’s Village and The Banana-Leaf Ball have won numerous awards, is on a quest to bring world issues to elementary and middle school children. One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference, set in Ghana, introduces kids to microfinance and the power of social entrepreneurship. One Hen gave rise to One Hen Academy (www.onehen.org), a social entrepreneurship curriculum with Boston Scores. Their downloadable lesson plans are used by educators to teach financial literacy and community engagement in more than 100 countries.#Katie’s 2010 book, The Good Garden: How One Family Went from Hunger to Having Enough, set in the Honduran hillsides, introduces kids to the concept of food security and shows how each of us, at any age, can combat global hunger (www.thegoodgarden.org). Mimi’s Village: And How Basic Health Care Transformed It is set in Kenya. It connects kids’ actions for global health to results in Africa. And her latest book, The Banana-Leaf Ball: How Play Can Change the World, is set at a refugee camp in Tanzania, where youth form a soccer team and grow socially and emotionally, finding community, confidence and hope.#Katie is also founder and principal of MilwayPLUS social impact advisors, and a former partner at The Bridgespan Group in Boston, where for a decade she led the firm’s knowledge practice. She has served on the board of relief and development agency World Vision U.S., coordinated community development programs in Latin America and Africa for Food for the Hungry International, and was a delegate to the 1992 Earth Summit. She has written several adult books on sustainable development, including The Human Farm: A Tale of Changing Lives and Changing Lands (Kumarian Press, 1994), which documented the work of sustainable agriculture pioneer Don Elias Sánchez (role model for The Good Garden’s teacher).#Prior to Bridgespan, Katie served as a consultant and senior director at Bain & Co., where she founded the firm’s global publishing group. A graduate of Stanford University, the Free University of Brussels and INSEAD, Katie spent a decade working in and around more than a dozen countries in Africa and Latin America on sustainable development projects, including village banking, food security, primary health care, water resourcing and education.

Born and raised in Lethbridge, Alberta, Diane Swanson was always a “nature nut”. She loved to collect rocks and watch bugs. When she grew up, she went to the University of Alberta, graduating with an honors degree and a gold medal in the social sciences. She taught in the West Indies for two years, then moved to Ottawa where she researched water resources for the Canadian government.#While raising two children, she began writing magazine articles and books for kids, focusing mostly on science and nature topics. She’s had more than 70 books published – plus more than 450 magazine articles.