TREES THAT FEED FOUNDATION

We aim to plant 1,000,000 trees within 10 years. A million trees will feed 4 million people sustainably. We intend to increase food production from trees by an order of magnitude and in the process feed hungry people, help to create jobs, and benefit the environment. We are not just delivering food, we are creating food independence, we provide people in developing countries with the ability to feed themselves and create businesses.

Our operating model is extremely simple and easy to understand. We raise funding mainly in the US and Canada; we purchase fruit producing trees in the US, Germany, Jamaica, Haiti, Costa Rica and now Kenya. We deliver those trees through partnering organizations to individual farmers, co-operatives and a small number of commercial organizations. We work with approximately 50 partner organizations to leverage our already extensive network of contacts at senior levels of government, churches, service clubs and other NGOs.
In addition to planting trees we run other programs specifically intended to keep the trees alive and to increase their value. So for example we run training seminars in local countries, teaching how to propagate, plant and care for fruit trees. We help entrepreneurs to start small businesses by supplying them with food processing equipment. And we buy their processed food product to get them established. And we distribute the food to schools and orphanages. We also provide the schools and orphanages with educational coloring books that teach the value of fruit trees.
We are running two research programs, one into the productivity (abundance and timing) of breadfruit bearing, and a second one, locating farms and breadfruit orchards. We are mapping those locations to facilitate sale and purchase of breadfruit in commercially viable quantities.
These programs are separate but highly integrated, all with the strategy of keeping the trees alive and productive.

Currently we're a volunteer organization with four part time paid staff. We rely on a group of volunteers in the US and also Haiti and Jamaica. We draw great strength from our partners, including the Government of Jamaica, National Tropical Botanic Garden and Three Angels Children's Relief, to name just a few. They provide funding or support in kind that allows us to continue our work at extremely low overhead cost. The founders together work approximately 1.5 FTEs in our office location. We use part time staff in the US, Jamaica, Haiti and Kenya. We use 400 sq.ft. of office space, provided to us at nominal cost by a generous landlord, Karl Lohre Painting Company. We have technology support provided by the founders. Our real strength is our passion and our partner organizations.

To date we have planted over 240,000 trees, mainly breadfruit but also cashew, mango and other food producing fruit trees. We've also delivered 24 kits to produce post-harvest products such as breadfruit flour. We've held numerous in person and online seminars to bring together agronomy experts, academics, farmers, private business, and political leaders in Haiti and Jamaica. We've received dozens of thank you letters, everyone from Government organizations to individual farmers, acknowledging the help we're giving them. We are delighted to report that our successes are scalable from the individual farmer level up to commercial sized food processing business.