Trees for the Future, Inc.

Our mission is to end poverty and hunger in vulnerable communities through regenerative agriculture- a model called the Forest Garden Solution. Agriculture as we know it today is one of the leading contributors to climate change- accelerating deforestation, soil erosion, and biodiversity loss. Our Forest Garden Approach revitalizes soils, and regenerates land in a way that efficiently uses space and retains water. This approach is also supporting farming families to increase their food diversity and yield, thereby working to end hunger and poverty in the process.

By 2030, we will use our training program to plant 1 billion trees through Forest Garden approach and other strategic planting initiatives. You can read more at: trees.org/decade/

Using over 30 years of entrepreneurial and practical, on-the-ground experience, TREES developed a teachable, scaleable, and resource efficient farming method that uses the common sense entrepreneurial abilities and desires of our farmers to gain self-sufficiency, hope, and prosperity: The Forest Garden Approach. We can break the cycle of poverty for millions of African farmers by helping them plant a Forest Garden, a small yet diverse mix of trees and vegetables that provides food to eat, fuel for cooking, and tools for daily use, while simultaneously improving water tables, nourishing the land, and providing shelter to wildlife. Furthermore, it provides multiple paydays for farmers as they sell the crops they grow at markets.

We recognize that there isn't a one size fits all approach to ending climate change, hunger and poverty, which is why we have three categories for implementation that meet the needs of each community based on geography, climate, culture, infrastructure, and local resources and partners.

Expansion – This is the type of Forest Garden project you hear us talk about most frequently. TREES staff work with farmer groups to establish Forest Gardens over a four-year period. There are typically between 150 – 300 farmers in these projects.

Collaboration – We don’t want to reinvent the wheel. When another organization or group is doing great work in a region but would benefit from agroforestry training, we collaborate with them to bring agroforestry and permaculture to more farmers.

Replication – This is when the students become the teachers. Once farmers go through our Forest Garden program, they can “Plant it Forward” and train neighboring farmers in a condensed version of the program.

Our three-category implementation approach gives us greater capacity to share our resources and implement Forest Gardens throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Replication is the key to our sustainable implementation model, in which students become the teachers and implement Forest Gardens throughout their community. By training farmers in a hands-on approach for over four years, they become experts in Forest Garden agroforestry and permagarden techniques, and have the capabilities to pass along their knowledge to their neighbors. This approach is the key to our sustainable growth model, and shows that our model can not only be passed from trainer to farmer, but from generation to generation.

We also have collaborative projects, in which we partner with other nonprofit organizations in the area in order to minimize replication of efforts while coming together to support our goals.

We have the mission, the vision, the training and the tools. All we need is support from our partners and donors so that we can continue to plant trees and change lives.

TREES currently has over 100 on-the-ground projects in 9 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa with 150-300 farming families per project. We have brought thousands of farmers out of poverty and planted over 215 million trees in our history. Furthermore, we created the Forest Garden Training Center, which gives access to all of our Forest Garden training materials to farmers and practitioners globally, allowing them to implement their own Forest Gardens and take exams to become certified to train farmers on the FGA. It is currently available in both English and French, and will be translated again in the coming year. Our programs are continuing to expand and we are adding in more projects in regions we currently work in.