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.

Jane Yealland, with her friend and collaborator Ann-Maureen Owens, is the co-author of the popular children’s information books Forts of Canada, The Kids Book of Canadian Exploration and Our Flag: The Story of Canada’s Maple Leaf.#The two authors met when they both had young children, eight in total, and spent many hours taking them to historical sites around Kingston, Ontario. These explorations led to writing books about some of the fascinating stories from Canada’s past. #Researching the story of Canada’s flag was the rare opportunity to learn directly from people who in the 1960s had been part of the effort in working for Canada to have its own unique flag. The late John Matheson had many stories to tell about the flag committee looking over 3000 flag designs, and the authors also had the opportunity to talk with Joan O’Malley, who as a young woman sewed the first maple leaf flag.#Along with her work as a research associate at Queen’s Univeristy, Jane writes for a local magazine and is currently working on the story of her great-uncle who flew alongside Billy Bishop in World War I. She lives in Kingston, Ontario, with her golden retriever, Dory, and calico cat, Biddie.