2023: A YEAR OF PLANTING FOR AND IN COMMUNITY
By Adela Ramos, Eden Standley, and TTF Staff.
Executive Director, Lowell Wyse, discusses tree policy at our September 30, 2023 neighborhood walk in the South End. Photo Credit: Julia Gonzalez-Wolf.
As we conclude our fifth year as a nonprofit organization, we share some of our favorite highlights and our accomplishments. This year, we surpassed our initial tree distribution goal of 2, 530 trees and, with your help, we continued to realize our vision of neighbors helping neighbors grow a greener, healthier, and more connected Greater Tacoma, Pierce County and the watersheds of Puget Sound.
2917 trees distributed with the help of 421 volunteers!
SCHOOLS NEED TREES
Volunteers at Mt. Tahoma High School. Photo Credit: Eden Standley.
Tacoma’s schools need trees! We started the year addressing this critical need by partnering with Tacoma Public Schools and City of Tacoma Urban Forestry to mobilize volunteers for two different planting events at schools with the goal of increasing student access to greenspace in nature-deprived neighborhoods.
In early February, the TTF team organized a volunteer planting event to put 58 trees in the ground at Madison Elementary School, which is one of the only publicly accessible green spaces in the Tacoma mall neighborhood.
In April, we partnered with American Forests and Weyerhaueser to plant 38 trees at Mt. Tahoma High School in South Tacoma, which serves a diverse population of students who are majority low-income.
In addition to supporting the physical and mental wellbeing of students, teachers, and school staff, the young trees will also increase tree equity in the surrounding neighborhoods.
Providing access to green spaces in public schools does not stop with planting. For young trees to become established, critical tree care, such as watering, is essential. Thanks to our amazing TTF part-time staff, Alejandro Fernández and Dan Nakamura, who made weekly watering treks out to Mt. Tahoma, the trees made it through the intense summer heat.
“It was nice having time to get to know [Alejandro] better and interact with Mt. Tahoma faculty as well as the community, mainly the Samoan community that uses the field as a cricket pitch.”
“My favorite part about the Madison planting was that we had around 100 volunteers, which is our most ever for a single event! We also planted a Giant Sequoia there that already had a massive root ball. The volunteers had to dig an enormous hole, and I remember how proud they were when they got that tree planted.”
TREE STEWARDS
Growing the urban forest requires strong city codes, planting and caring for trees, and also a web of tree stewards who are trained in tree care, tree policy, and talking with their neighbors about tree benefits. Our free Tree Stewards program is an effort to grow this web of local tree advocates. In 2023, we held two, including our very first training for folks who live, work, and play in the Parkland neighborhood. Taught by our founder, Sarah Low, the training equipped 25 new stewards with the skills they need to engage their communities in discussions about urban forestry, and to protect, maintain, and advocate for tree canopy coverage in Tacoma and Parkland.
As the year concludes, there are 25 new Tree Stewards walking around Greater Tacoma ready to answer questions about trees!
GREEN BLOCKS: PARKLAND
Volunteers, TTF and Pierce Country staff at Green Blocks: Parkland. Photo Credit: Eden Standley.
Last winter TTF’s Green Blocks program came to Parkland for the first time. Parkland has one of the lowest tree equity scores in the state, making tree planting important for the long-term well being of residents and the environment. In partnership with Pierce County and the Department of Natural Resources, we distributed nearly 900 trees to 255 residents in the neighborhood, 45 of which were planted by volunteers.
The program’s success alerted us to the community’s need for and interest in greening their neighborhood. A second Green Blocks: Parkland that will also include Spanaway is underway for March 23, 2024.
VOLUNTEER STORIES
The stories our volunteers shared with us throughout the year remind us that trees connect us to those we love, and that trees our with us when life begins and when life ends.
“A resident had requested an Incense Cedar in honor of their new baby, Cedar. The resident had hoped to plant the tree in front of the window but there was not enough space, so the planting team cleared an invasive ivy berm and planted it in Cedar’s future backyard.”
“A resident requested a tree for their row, and we planted it on the day of their best friend’s memorial service, and now the Ginkgo is named after that late friend.”
COMMUNITY TREE SHARES
For TTF, moving toward a greener future must be done in partnership with the local Indigenous Tribes, stewards of the land since time immemorial. A highlight of this year was the tree share we collaborated on with the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, the Nature Conservancy, and Tacoma Creates. Celebrating Native and culturally significant plants, the event commenced with a traditional welcome ceremony performed by tribal leaders, and the first hour gave priority to tribal members and staff. We hope to continue partnering with the Puyallup Tribe in creating a greener and more sustainable urban forest.
TREES AND HEALTH
In December, we partnered with the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department and Tacoma Creates to bring trees to Lincoln District focusing on addressing health inequities in our community by growing tree canopy.
COMMUNITY TREE PROGRAM
TTF Planting Coordinator, Jaala Smith, has a conversation with McKinley Hill resident as Tree Captain, Joey Hulbert and team plant her tree! Photo Credit: Julia Gonzalez-Wolf.
This year marked the first year of the Community Tree Program, a partnership with the City of Tacoma Urban Forestry Program, which allows us to collaborate on key events such as Green Blocks, Branch Out, and Tree Stewards Trainings. This partnership ensures that our planting events continue to occur annually, thereby allowing us to serve Tacoma residents consistently and to reach more communities.
Through this partnership, we held our third Green Blocks program, which focused on greening and community building in the McKinley Hill neighborhood. Through Green Blocks: McKinley Hill, we distributed 228 trees to 101 residents in the area. Our 56 volunteers even planted 156 of those trees for residents. Quickly thereafter, we hosted our Branch Out giveaway at Stafford elementary school, and distributed 408 trees to residents around Pierce County.
Learn more about the Community Tree program here!
“My favorite memory of this year was delivering trees to the residents of McKinley Hill. After weeks of phone calls, emails, spreadsheets and logistics, we loaded hundreds of trees into trucks and drove them out to residents. We pulled up to a small house with two children (and a dog) pressed up against the front window, grinning ear to ear. As we stepped out of the truck we were greeted by them cheerfully yelling “The trees! The trees! The trees are here!” Connecting them with something that will grow with their family and being a part of their memory of this tree was incredibly rewarding and special to me.”
TACOMA CLIMATE LEADERSHIP COHORT 2023
After a successful pilot program in 2022, this past June we facilitated the second annual Tacoma Climate Leadership Cohort with a new group of diverse and passionate frontline community members. The Tacoma Climate Leadership Cohort is a program organized by the Tacoma Tree Foundation on behalf of the City of Tacoma Office of Environmental Policy and Sustainability. From June 23-25 at the UW-T, 15 engaged and energized participants, mainly hailing from Central and South Tacoma, heard from elected officials, local organizations, and activists about Advocacy, City Council structure and processes, Civic Action in Practice, Complete Neighborhoods, Food Justice, Housing Justice, Natural Systems, and Sustainable Transportation. Their final projects focused on civic engagement, food justice, the urban heat island effect, depaving, and tree equity. We are grateful for the opportunity to work with passionate Tacoma residents, whose commitment to the City is already creating a positive impact on the lives of their neighbors and other communities!
Stay tuned for the 2024 call for applications, coming early next year!
Left to right, top to bottom: Adela Ramos, Evelyn Gallardo, Ursula Thompson, Jane Arge, Isaac Penn, Erica Fernández, Ana Rojas, Shadiamon Barnes, Eden Standley, and Kenzie Knapp. Photo Credit: Julia Gonzalez-Wolf.
TREE CARE
Tree care is just as important as planting and distributing trees, and this year we hosted two tree care workshops on the topics of tree propagation and structural pruning, as well as a tree failure webinar to help attendees understand how factors other than disease lead to tree failure.
Participants in the in-person propagation workshop left with a couple of newly propagated trees that would soon grow into saplings come spring, and the folks who attended the structural pruning workshop learned the basics of how, why, and when to prune their newly established trees.
Our planting coordinator, Jaala Smith, said that “Our participants at the structural pruning workshop let us know that learning about the branch collar, how to identify it and care for it was really helpful.”
Follow this link to watch Sarah Low’s Structural Pruning Workshop, and learn about tree failure by watching Dr. Brian Kane’s Tree Failure: An Introduction to Arboreal Biomechanics.
CULTIVATING TREE LOVE INDOORS AND OUTDOORS
Planting trees and tree care are two of the most important ways in which we act on our commitment to growing the urban forest. This commitment is rooted in convictions such as our belief that everyone in Greater Tacoma deserves access to the myriad benefits of trees—and in our love of trees.
Participants in the bilingual Lincoln District tree walk held in partnership with Tacoma Creates and the Tacoma Public Library. Photo Credit: Julia Gonzalez-Wolf.
This love is nourished through our tree walks and indoor presentations where we satisfy our curiosity to learn more about trees, gather with others to admire trees, and share the many ways our personal and community histories can be told through the trees we love and have loved—and doing so in two languages!
This year we held 20 tree walks, 5 of which were held in Spanish or as bilingual walks.
Topics covered included mindfulness and wellness, tree disease, and tree policy.
Our bilingual walks have given us the opportunity to create new partnerships, as we did with Caminemos Juntos in September at Wapato Lake Park. This mindfulness walk provided wellness support for Latina women and parents who gather weekly to discuss perinatal health and provide each other with critical parenting and health support. It was an honor to add our tree walks to their ongoing health program.
We also gathered indoors 21 times, online or in-person, to explore diverse ways of cultivating our curiosity and love of trees, including academic presentations, Voice Tacoma Radio Universal presentations in Spanish, and creative workshops, where we wrote and drew haiku comics and wrote odes to the trees of Tacoma.
All of these events were opportunities to meet Tacomans from all over the City, and come together through our shared love of trees.
“Our educational events always teach me something new about trees, and I always learn something new about the participants who join us. At a recent event, a participant shared with me how, through TTF walks and presentations, she has found a community she now relies on for companionship. This made me think of the “community” in community forestry in an entirely new way.”
58 total events produced where a total of 1335 participants joined us!
TACOMA TREE FOUNDATION TRUCK
Executive Director, Lowell Wyse, transports dozens of trees in his tiny Prius for our tree shares. Photo Credit: Lowell Wyse.
Growing our Foundation requires setting new goals for ourselves. Reaching these goals involves relying on the support of volunteers and donors. This fall, we set our sights high as we launched a campaign to purchase an environmentally friendly truck in support of our goal to keep the young trees we plant in schools and public spaces alive and healthy, and to develop more efficient outreach and distribution processes.
To reach this goal, we put out a call to repeating and new donors, not knowing if we would reach the $25,000 we set out to raise. But by the end of September 2023, we had raised $60,000, and as we close the year, we are excited to share that a Ford F-150 Lightning truck will soon be arriving in Tacoma–the official TTF Truck!
Thanks for affirming the work we do by helping us reach this goal!
SHARED VALUES AND GOALS
As this year’s highlights and accomplishments show, everything we do, we do in community, with neighbors, volunteers, and partners, and the many donors and organizations who support our work financially. Thanks to them, we can keep our commitment to providing free trees and free education. Here is a partial list of the organizations who supported our work in 2023:
American Forests
Bank of America
City of Tacoma: Community Tree Program
City of Tacoma: Climate Leadership Cohort
Getting to Green
Greater Tacoma Community Foundation
HUNDREDS OF INDIVIDUAL DONORS!
Martin-Fabert Foundation
MultiCare
North End Neighborhood Council
One Roof Foundation
Pierce Conservation District
Pierce County
Pierce County Master Gardeners
REI
South End Neighborhood Council
Tacoma Creates
Tacoma Garden Club
Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department
Tacoma Public Utilities
The Nature Conservancy
Washington State Department of Natural Resources (Green Blocks: Parkland)
Weyerhauser
