Pallavi Varma Patil leads the Environmental Education portfolio at ATREE, where she facilitates a national network of school-level environment educators called The School Of Nature, Action, Inquiry, and Learning (SNAIL). This initiative promotes and strengthens place-based, hands-on ecological learning across schools in India. In addition, she leads the Non-Degree Program at the ATREE Academy, extending its reach to diverse stakeholders interested in conservation and sustainability.

Her broader work—as a scholar, practitioner, and educator—centers on education and food futures. She explores the imagination of alternative futures through a Gandhi–Tagore framework of a “Good Society”.  She is a co-founder of Living Utopias – a community-based educational initiative focused on alternatives to development, and co-led  ‘The Ragi Project‘- (2017–2019), an urban school millet farming initiative.

Before joining ATREE, Pallavi was a faculty member at Azim Premji University (APU), Bengaluru, where she enjoyed teaching in the School of Education and the School of Development for nearly a decade (2012–2023). Over the past 25 years, she has worked as a development practitioner with organizations such as APU, CHILDLINE India Foundation, Sir Ratan Tata Trust, and Waste Wise Trust.

Her work is driven by her interest in transitioning to a just, sustainable society transcending disciplinary and cultural boundaries, especially in the context of the current climate crisis. Pallavi is the co-author of a Gandhi book for young adults in English and more recently of a children’s book on agrobiodiversity in Spanish. She has also written extensively on the theme of alternatives in several academic, and popular publications.