Dear Tree-Plenish Partners and Friends,
The Tree-Plenish team is proud to announce that we are working with 90 schools this academic year and are on track to plant over 15,000 trees across the country. We are working with schools across 20 states from California to New Hampshire.
You may be wondering how we got here. It all started when we were seniors at Mansfield High School in Massachusetts. One day, it dawned on us that we had used thousands and thousands of sheets of paper over the course of our schooling. As youth passionate about building a sustainable future, we decided that we wanted to plant enough trees to offset our high school’s paper usage for the past academic year.
We were able to successfully plan a community tree-planting event where volunteers planted over 300 trees in the yards of residents of our town. We exceeded the amount of trees needed to offset our school’s paper usage and were shocked by the outpouring of support and encouragement we received from our community. This is when we realized that our model had potential, and we wanted to expand our efforts beyond one school and one town.
The following year, the world was turned upside down because of Covid, so we were not able to host any of the events we had planned, but we used our time in quarantine to think about Tree-Plenish’s future. We thought a lot about our core beliefs. Our belief in building a sustainable future by giving back what we take; our belief in channeling the power of youth to create meaningful change; and our belief in the strength of a local community coming together to take action.
In August, our team of two set out with a humble goal of bringing our program to ten schools. Knowing we would not be able to pull this off by ourselves, we recruited a team of 25 college students from across the country to help us with outreach, marketing, and operations.
As a team working during a pandemic, we know each other as faces on a zoom screen. However, we share an important bond: our passion and dedication to the Tree-Plenish mission. Over the next few months, our team of volunteers outperformed our wildest expectations and were able to develop partnerships with over 90 schools, totally surpassing our original goal of 10.
We are truly impressed by the power of youth - the power of our student volunteer team to manage our 501(c)(3) organization and the power of our high school student leaders to plan tree-planting events in their communities.
To continue pushing our organization and mission forward, we need your help. There are many ways to get involved and support our mission. You can find a local high school event near you, and request a tree for your yard. You may consider donating to our organization to help support our growth. Finally, you can recruit high school students to host an event next academic year at their local high school.
Together, we can make the world more sustainable, one tree at a time!
Sincerely,
Lizzy Elsner
Sethu Odayappan