Plant For The Planet USA

Our Mission

Mission statement

The mission of Plant-for-the-Planet is to empower children and young people worldwide to engage in global solutions to fight the climate crisis. Our core focus is on the planting of trees as a generation-spanning, peace building activity, providing hope and buying us time to reach net-zero emissions. To that end, Plant-for-the-Planet is supporting global reforestation and ecosystem restoration efforts.

Description

Our adventures began in 2007, when at the end of a school presentation 9-years-old Felix Finkbeiner called on children of the world to plant a million trees in each country on Earth. This idea soon became an initiative backed by thousands. Plant-for-the-Planet was born! In the following years, Felix attended major conferences and events to invite children from all over the world to join his initiative as Climate Justice Ambassadors and to mobilize people around the globe to plant trees. In 2011, Felix spoke at the United Nations in New York, and called mankind for planting of a trillion trees. Only a few month later, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) handed over to us their Billion Tree Campaign - and with it the official World Tree Counter. This Billion Tree Campaign we soon expanded to become the Trillion Tree Campaign. Our claim is “Stop talking. Start planting.” In 2015, Plant-for-the-Planet Foundation in collaboration with Plant-for-the-Planet A.C. in Mexico started its own restoration site on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Here we contribute to the global goal by planting the trees donated to us and thus restore degraded forests in one of the most threatened ecosystems of the world. As we embark on the restoration journey ourselves we can also provide all organizations worldwide with adequate support based as well on science and experience.

Our vision and goals

Plant-for-the-Planet has two central objectives: to support ecosystem restoration efforts globally as well as educate and prepare today’s children and youth to face the challenges of the climate crisis. For the children and young people it is about nothing less than their future on this planet. To support restoration and reforestation, Plant-for-the-Planet has developed different technical tools. One of these is the Plant-for-the-Planet platform, which favors the collaboration of people worldwide by helping restoration organizations throughout the world to get funds to finance the work of restoration in their countries. A spearheading innovation is the TreeMapper App. This App allows restoration organizations throughout the world to document and monitor their work directly on the field. All collected data are matched on the Plant-for-the-Planet platform so that the donors can track the progress of planting just from the sofa.

To empower children and youth worldwide to make themselves heard Plant-for-the-Planet supports them in multiple ways. First of all with the Plant-for-the-Planet Academies, one-day-workshops during which children learn from their peers and train to become Climate Justice Ambassadors in their turn. In these academies, the children experience in a vivid way how the climate crisis threatens their future and the lives of people around the world. In working groups, they develop initial ideas for their actions they can take to mobilize for their future.. This is aimed at familiarizing them with social and climate justice, as well as their own civic duty. To date, 1,656 Academies in 75 countries have taken place and 92,837Climate Justice Ambassadors have been trained. The Ambassadors can then further their education and involvement by following online-workshops offered by Plant-for-the-Planet and held by individual experts and coaches or e-learning materials. We also enable our Climate Justice Ambassadors to hold speeches at events to raise awareness about the climate crisis and inform others about the mission of Plant-for-the-Planet. The impact of COVID-19 The global pandemic has had an impact on our activities. While our Plant-for-the-Planet international offices employees were able to work from home - thanks to digital communication tools and well prepared workflows - in Mexico our forest restoration team cannot. However, we are happy to report that we are able to continue working on our planting site and thanks to the implementation of measures ensuring the safety of our workers. Regarding our Academies, we had to move to an online format to ensure the safety of the participants and their family.

Transparency and monitoring

If you wish to learn more about how our organization operates, you can find our latest reports on our website.