Good Morning TREES Members and Friends of the Organization,

For the first time in my recollection, we are starting our e-newsletter with a request - please donate as little or as much as you like through our facebook cause and help us win $50,000!  Its all about participation - not total donations!  The cause with the greatest number of individuals making a donation will win the big prize, and there are also daily prizes up to $1,000.   Please click here to go to our cause page, where your donation can help us plant over 500,000 trees!

This month's e-newsletter has some great project updates - community led reforestation in Haiti, a great project incorporating forest gardens, firebreaks, and fruit trees in Honduras, and David Tye forging new partnerships in Zambia.   And, for our neighbors in the DC area, TREES will be at the International Festival in Silver Spring this Saturday, Oct 17, where you can register to win a brown-turkey fig tree (propagated by yours truly this past spring). Now, on to the ...

Hot News

• News from the Field
  Creating a Real Alternative for Haiti
  New Projects in Zambia
  Fruit Trees, Firebreaks, and Forest Gardens in Honduras
• Join TREES at the IIFEST in Silver Spring Sat. Oct. 17
• Local Theater Supports Tree Pals
• Marking TREES 20th Anniversary
• Help TREES in the Facebook Cause Giving Challenge
• Latest Quarterly Newsletter Ready to Download
• TREES Project Pictures on FLICKR
• TREES is on Skype

Ziziphus mauritiana and Acacia nilotica
planted as a living fence in Senegal

A 'Green Tree Rich' village
in India, thanks to TREES and GTF

News from the Field

Creating a Real Alternative in Haiti
While Haitian's are continually arrested along the border with the Dominican Republic for illegal tree cutting and charcoal production, our Haiti program shows a real solution.  Program coordinator Ethan Budiansky recently returned from a very successful trip to Haiti, where he visited numerous projects, fields and farmers involved in the 1 million tree planting campaign for 2009.  He participated in a tree planting “kombit” (Creole for work party), to plant thousands of trees in one farmer’s field near Arcahaie.  A meeting with community leaders was held at the new TREES office, located in Leveque.  Ethan also traveled north to Gonaives to explore the possibility of developing a program there in collaboration with the Yélé Foundation in 2010 to plant much-needed trees along the degraded mountainsides.  Please click here to see all of the pictures from Ethan's trip.

New Projects in Zambia
Trees for the Future is increasing its program support for Zambian Projects, with a member of its program staff, David Tye,  visiting project sites in Zambia for the first time. David is currently meeting with organizations and visiting projects sites in Kabwe, Lusaka, Chikuni, and Livingstone, which are located throughout Central and Southern Zambia. Trees for the Future has started providing tree seeds and training manuals to projects such as the Savannah Project and the Kasisi Agriculture Training Center. The Savannah project works with Seventh Day Adventist churches throughout the country and intend, with the support of TREES, to plant 1,000 seedlings in each of the 1,000 Seventh Day Adventist Churches in Zambia for a total of 1,000,000 Moringa, Leucaena and Albizia trees. The Kasisi Agriculture Training Center educates about 1,000 farmers on tree nursery management and adopting agroforestry techniques. Trees for the Future will be providing seeds and training material to Kasisi. Our Zambia Program will expand in 2010 to work with at least 10 organizations throughout the country.

Fruit Trees, Fire Breaks, and Forest Gardens in Honduras
Coffee and basic grain producers in the buffer zone of Cerro Azul Meambar National park face two problems - losses from fires on neighboring properties, and dependence on one crop (beans in lower elevations and coffee in higher elevations). TREES has been aiding our partner organization Aldea Global in designing permanent tree based fire protection methods along with projects to diversity the incomes for local farmers.

In 2009 TREES FOR THE FUTURE’s local technician, Gerardo Santos, coordinated the activities in 5 nurseries. The major focus of these nurseries has been shade and timber species, but this year with the help of Gerardo’s grafting skills, they also produced fruit trees to help with the income diversification component. Between 3 nurseries, 5,000 grafted Citrus and Avacado plants were produced. These plants were distributed to local producers to be planted in coffee plantations, creating a second level of production between the coffee and the higher level of shade. Trees were also planted in areas that are too steep for efficient bean and corn production, or on borders of fields to give farmers more incentive to maintain their fire barriers (to protect these valuable trees).

The harvest of Citrus and avocadoes is July-September, while coffee harvest is November-February.  The harvest from the fruit species helps farmers during the lean times when money from the previous coffee harvest is running low, but before the onset of the intensive work needed to prepare for the coffee harvest, and after intense bean and corn planting season that runs from May-June.

This project also trained staff of Aldea Global, students of 4 middle schools, and two interns on grafting techniques, so that they can provid their own high quality grafted fruit trees in the future. The average success rates throught the project was 80%.

Nursery in Haiti	Distributing Citrus seedlings in Honduras	1 year od Acrocarpus trees in Honduras

Join TREES at the Intergenerational International Festival (IIFEST) in Silver Spring this Saturday!
This Saturday, October 17th, 2009, Trees for the Future will be one of hundreds of vendors participating in the IIFEST in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland. This promises to be the biggest event of the season in Downtown, with international live music, hands-on family activities, traditional artisans, a wide variety of international foods, and live dance. 

The goal of the festival is promote cultural understanding and to create a space where all generations can interact and learn from one another. In support of this, Trees for the Future will be in attendance to teach community members about our work helping to improve livelihoods and restore degraded lands to sustainable productivity throughout the world.  And, we will be giving away a fig tree!  The festival will be held from 11am to 6pm. Please come and visit us!  For more information, please click here to download a PDF flyer.

Local Theater Supports Tree Pals
Tree Boy, a play for kids about a young boy who defends his favorite tree, will be showing at the Olney Theatre in Olney, Maryland.  The Olney theatre will be hosting a silent auction before and after showings of the play on October 17th and 18th in support of the Tree Pals program.

If you live in the Maryland area and have kids, please support Trees for the Future at this unique event.  For more information, check out the Olney Theatre website at olneytheatre.org

Help TREES in the Facebook Cause Donation Drive
Please help us plant 20 million trees in the coming year!  From October 7th through November 15th, Facebook Causes is holding their second giving challenge, where groups with the most unique daily donations are eligible to win part of $150,000 in overall prizes!  Its not the amount donated, but the number of donors that counts.  We need your help, and hope that we can all make a great impact together!  Click here to go to our cause donation page.

Marking TREES 20th Anniversary
From August 2009-2010, TREES is celebrating our 20th anniversary year. In light of this, we are setting the challenging but reachable goal of planting 20 million trees in 2010.  The need is great and the projects are shovel-ready, but we can only do this with your support. Please donate and help us reach that goal!

We have pulled together a handful of old photographs from over the years, which you can see here on flickr.

Trees Quarterly Newsletter Ready to Download
The latest issue of the Johnny Ipil Seed News, TREES quarterly newsletter, is available to download from our website.  It is a retrospective issue, looking back at the past 20 plus years, and also offering some ideas as to where we are heading.  Click here to go to our news page, where you can download this newsletter.

TREES Pictures on FLICKR
TREES has an incredible range of pictures from the past 30 years and as we distribute more cameras and GPS units to our field representatives, we are receiving more than ever before. We are working hard to put our best pictures from all of our project areas online. You can see our pictures by going to http://www.flickr.com/photos/plant-trees/sets/ (no logins or passwords needed).  Enjoy and share with your friends! We have compiled a special set of pictures for our 20th anniversary, which you can see here.

TREES is on SKYPE
Our international friends and partners will be happy to know that TREES can be called for free using SKYPE. Our skype name is treesftf - call us!