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Speaker’s Story - Mattie Stepanek
SPEAKER’S STORY
Start your journey by getting inspired by two amazing speakers and their life stories.
Read each story, and at the end complete the activity. You can also share the stories with your friends and family to help get you into that public speaking mindset!
Greta Thunberg
A fighter for our planet
Greta Thunberg was born in January 2003; her mother is an opera singer and both her father and grandfather are actors. Greta started to learn about climate change when she was only 8 years old and she couldn’t understand why people weren’t doing more about it. So, instead of waiting for other people, she decided to do something about it herself!
In August 2018, instead of going to school,* Greta made a big sign that said ‘SCHOOL STRIKE FOR CLIMATE’, and sat down outside the government buildings in Sweden, where she lives. It was Greta’s way of getting noticed by politicians so that they would take action to stop global warming. Her plan worked and word spread about what she was doing, and soon many thousands of students from around the world were making their own signs and making their own voices heard.
Greta has Asperger syndrome, which means that she sees the world a little differently. Greta sees this as a good thing, she calls it her “superpower”! Since a very young age, she has been giving speeches, appeared in documentaries and had lots of books and articles written about her. To be kinder to the planet, Greta does not fly, and in August 2019 she travelled all the way from England to New York in a boat that was powered by the sun and wind!
* We don’t want you to do this! There are lots of ways to fight climate change both in and out of school.
