A Place For Celebration

A unique Hillsboro staging site makes for incredible community building

If you’ve ever volunteered at a Friends of Trees planting, you can picture a typical event staging site. A parking lot filled with trucks, some pop-up tents over registration and a breakfast spread. At our Hillsboro planting last month, volunteers encountered something a little different.

They walked through a heart-shaped arch to register at the entrance of M&M Marketplace, a multinational mercado in the heart of Hillsboro’s Calle Diez neighborhood. Volunteers sipped coffee and ate pastries at one of the dining areas inside, among the 80 independent business stalls and food vendors. Since the first planting there in 2023, M&M Marketplace has become a go-to staging site for Hillsboro plantings, a partnership that Neighborhood Trees Specialist Mario Catani is grateful for.

“It’s the perfect spot in the heart of the planting area,” Mario says. “And we get to show the marketplace and how cool it is to people in Hillsboro who haven’t been there before.”

Volunteers set out to plant 40 trees throughout Calle Diez and Downtown Hillsboro, including some trees at Lincoln Street Elementary School. One of the young crew members was so excited to plant at her school! This event also marked the 300th tree that Friends of Trees has added to the Calle Diez neighborhood.

Among the volunteers was a crew of students from Centro Cultural de Washington County, which among other programs, offers a youth STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) education program. Their Climate Justice Leadership program is designed to help young people of color learn about the environment and civic engagement through the lens of climate change. Students learn about wildlife, watersheds, and native plants, as well as topics like public testimony.

In between trees, Centro students talked about their Lego robotics competition the next day. Friends of Trees had partnered with Centro on a couple projects in the past, including a planting in Forest Grove designed to address the impending impacts of Emerald Ash Borer. We heard that students are already taking those lessons home and sharing with their families what trees they should plant to replace their ash trees when the time comes.

By the time crews got back to M&M Marketplace, the market was bustling with people shopping at stalls or getting lunch at one of the many food trucks—tacos al pastor carved right from the spit, creamy horchatas, and so much more—a perfectly lively scene to get swept up into after a morning planting trees in the neighborhood.

“The best moments of the day for me were after the planting,” Mario says. “Hanging out with volunteers on a sunny day, supporting the vendors there, especially with everything going on right now. We got to have that moment to bond and celebrate the day.”

Mario hopes to continue partnering with M&M Marketplace, exploring opportunities like community outreach, bilingual tree walks and presentations, and of course, more tree planting.