Develop our FCF "Adopt-A-Tree" program

[smlambert]

Figure out our "real" annual costs for taking care of a tree at one of our several planting sites (determine our ideal maintenance schedule, how many hours spent at a particular site over a year, divide by number of trees at that site to get an estimate, should include water delivery, mileage, etc). This can and should include volunteer hours, as we have a cost in managing the volunteer stewardship program, and if no volunteers show up, the care hours required will land on our staff. There are economies of scale, when there are more trees at a site, there is less travel, fewer water totes and mulch deliveries required etc, so some small sites may initially have a higher cost. In this, we may have to take an average.

As we do our tree inventory, we know how many individual trees are at each site (and plan to eventually know the specific geolocation of each tree). As part of our "dashboard", we want to offer ways for different personas to view and filter the data.

As part of this FCF Adopt-a-Tree program, we want individuals or companies who participate in the program to be able to go to a dashboard and see which trees their $$ are helping pay to care for.

The cost and design of this program are very flexible, for the sake of an example, let's say that it costs $5 to care for 1 tree for 1 year. If someone donates $25 they Adopt-A-Single-Tree for 5 years, or they Adopt-Five-Trees for $1 year (preference for the former). We can decide how we wish to represent it, but, we should also determine for each site (or each tree) when it will reach the free-to-grow stage and cap our maintenance of those sites at a certain number of years (afforestation plan suggested 5-7 years).

Examples of how this can be applied:

• For a company that wishes to donate a small amount, say $5 to every report they write or every item they sell, they could tell their customers that they have just contributed to the stewardship and care of a tree at Site X for an entire year. Need to come up with a nice phrase to describe what impact such a contribution has.
• For a company that wants to donate $1000, we may want to apply those funds to care for 200 trees at Site X for 5 years (when they reach their free-to-grow stage).
• For an individual who wants to give $25, it pays for the stewardship, care, and maintenance of a tree at Site X until it reaches its free-to-grow stage in 5 years.

As part of this program, we would encourage donors to not only donate the funds, but also visit and help directly care for their tree(s) at Site X. We would offer them a QR code that gets them to a filtered view of the dashboard that shows where the trees that they are supporting are (and possibly even when the last time someone was at the site and had watered/weeded, etc).

After initially developing the idea, searched to see if anyone else is doing the same, and the answer is "no", however there are loose mentions of similar terminology, and to be clear, they are very different concepts. these are not at all what we hope to which All that said, we can rename our "Adopt-A-Tree" program to something else if needed and to avoid confusion.

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On a quick internet search, other similar named activities:

• https://www.ecologyottawa.ca/2017-03-07-adopt-a-tree
  • take care of a city tree and mark it on an Ecology Ottawa map, not a real program, map links from that blog are now defunct
• https://www.livclean.ca/product-page/tree-adoption (carbon registry)

[smlambert]

"We are your partners for success."

[smlambert]

Potential alternate name for the program: "bamendan" program / "care for it" program bamendan means "care for it" in Objiwe

Project Bamendan Bamendan Project

[smlambert]

Related - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ0SP8agotY (for Kanawayihetaytan Askiy "lets take care of the land" certificate, an Indigenous-led Living Lab, wahkohtowin/kinship)

[jodinewman]

Adding @leannbyatte to potentially help with this