TEALEAVES' The Garden of Secrets Project Wins Honorable Mention in Fast Company 2020 World Changing Ideas Awards

Today, master tea blender TEALEAVES announces its selection by Fast Company as an Honoree in their 2020 World Changing Ideas Awards in two categories: Education and Creativity. The project, The Garden of Secrets, is a philanthropic exploration between TEALEAVES, the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden and 18 other non-governmental institutions, universities, and foundations.

Created with a mission to empower environmental stewardship through impactful design, The Garden of Secrets is an open source learning library featuring plants - the planet's earliest designers - as the teacher. Through the exploration, visitors unearth the "idea seed bank": a multi-media library comprised of expert insights and case studies providing inspiration for your own world changing idea, and the resources to begin enacting meaningful change through sustainable design.

Now in its fourth year, Fast Company's World Changing Ideas Awards honor the businesses, policies, projects and concepts that are actively engaged and deeply committed to flattening the curve when it comes to the climate crisis, social injustice, or economic inequality. As evidenced by the current global landscape of public health, the interconnectivity across all corners of the world is at a height never seen before. Advocating for biodiversity through biomimicry, The Garden of Secrets showcases botanical gardens as essential resources in the changing outlook of our modern ecosystems.

"We want to help create a movement and demonstrate that any organization - whether it be from tea to technology - can adopt biomimetic methods to play their part to make the world more sustainable. Biomimicry offers a means to solve problems baked into the solution, instead of serving as a band-aid. Our unified goal is to blend our mutual love for plants and botanicals with biomimetic design to attract newfound interest in the plants that we take for granted," says TEALEAVES CEO, Lana Sutherland.

This project is brought to life with the The Garden of Secrets Documentary, a refreshingly optimistic outlook aimed to inspire solutions to the climate crisis in this divisive time. The film features leading botanists, biologists, architects, activists and designers, recounting brief anthologies of brilliant inventions brought to life through plant-based biomimicry - be it solutions for water conservation in drought, or solar sails for interplanetary travel.

Tackling the complex challenges facing the modern world, The Garden of Secrets demonstrates how the wonders of nature - perfected through millions of years of evolutionary trial and error - lend themselves to inspire brilliant, world changing, solutions.

"As a David amongst Goliaths, we are proof that even a small company can make a big difference." - Lana Sutherland, TEALEAVES Co-Founder and CEO

The 2020 awards feature entries from across the globe, from Vancouver to Singapore to Tel Aviv. A panel of eminent judges selected winners and finalists from a pool of more than 3,000 entries across transportation, education, food, politics, technology, and more. TEALEAVES is spotlighted alongside the other recipients of the 2020 World Changing Ideas awards in the May/June issue of Fast Company magazine, which will be on newsstands May 5.

About the World Changing Ideas Awards
World Changing Ideas is one of Fast Company's major annual awards programs and is focused on social good, seeking to elevate finished products and brave concepts that make the world better. A panel of judges from across sectors choose winners, finalists, and honorable mentions based on feasibility and the potential for impact. With a goal of awarding ingenuity and fostering innovation, Fast Company draws attention to ideas with great potential and helps them expand their reach to inspire more people to start working on solving the problems that affect us all.

About TEALEAVES
Established in 1994, TEALEAVES is one of the very few tea blenders in the world, known for crafting the highest quality teas in small batches by hand. TEALEAVES strives for perfection, driven by the never-ending quest to make the perfect cup of tea. With the philosophy of inspiring creativity and connections through the art of blending, TEALEAVES has gripped the hearts and minds of five-star hotels and Michelin Star chefs, worldwide, as their tea brand of choice for over two decades. With a unified goal of inspiring connections and creativity, TEALEAVES blends techniques, stories, people, companies and ideas to understand and tackle global issues. To learn more about the work that TEALEAVES is doing to promote awareness and enact change, visit: https://www.tealeaves.com/pages/our-ethos.

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