The journey from 20p to tree.

Trees for Change is a micro organisation- it's basically myself making the flyers, designing the logo and this website and of course putting together and delivering the education package and Ru turning the donations into trees in the ground.

The beauty of being so small is that you can track exactly where donations and how they're used, so what happens when a child donates 20p for a tree? Let's follow the journey below:

Step one

Schools donate

Pupils develop enterprise skills by creating and designing an event to raise a small amount of money. In the above case it's £60 from Cwmrhydeceirw Primary in Swansea.

Step two

Ru recieves the donation

The £60 school donation is transferred by me to Ru Hartwell. Ru runs the NGO Community Carbon Link in Lampeter. He channels all donations to fund the community tree nursery in Bore, Coastal Province, Kenya where he is a Director. Every penny raised in the UK is spent on raising and planting trees in Kenya.

Step three

Donations become trees

Donations are used to purchase all that is needed to grow young trees- planting pockets, compost, shade netting, fuel to deliver the young trees to the planting site etc. The money is also used to fund part time work for 60 local women who plant the seed and tend the young trees. It also funds a tree nursery manager, a forest centre manager, 3 planting site monitors and a project photographer. Taking into account the number of trees planted so far (4.9 million) and to the amount donated, this works out to 20p per tree. The £60 donation from Cwmrhydeceirw Primary equates to the funding of three hundred trees!

Step Four

The trees are planted!

The final step is to get the small trees into the grounds.There are two planting seasons in Kenya, one in April-May and a second in October-November.

In late 2022 over 2000 farmers and 200 schools recieved trees to plant. Schools tend to take the most of the trees as they have more available land which means that the majorits of trees are planted by schoolchildren.

It's hoped that production at the nursery will rise to 1.5 million trees a year by this Autumn with an aim to have 10 million trees planted by 2026!

Gallery

Below are some of the latest photographs from Bore, including photographs of the nursery and of some of the schools who've planted trees from the project.