Meyer Memorial Trust Awards $25,000 to Friends of Trees

The Meyer Memorial Trust has awarded $25,000 to Friends of Trees through its Grassroots Grants program, which provides key support to projects important to smaller nonprofits and communities.

The funds awarded to Friends of Trees will support the integration of the Eugene Tree Foundation (ETF) into Friends of Trees, including the development of a two-year strategic plan, expenses for a program director, and ten tree steward trainings and community planting events.

Founded in 1997, ETF enhances community livability through collaborative stewardship of Eugene’s natural landscape using education, advocacy, and planting. To date, the group has planted about 2,500 trees, with 1,000 of those in natural areas.

“Only in the past year did we try to incorporate the Friends of Trees model of getting homeowners involved,” said Erik Burke, board president of ETF. Previously, ETF chose a planting strip that needed trees, sent notices to nearby neighbors to let them know that trees would be planted there, and planted the trees.

ETF plans to model its current planting programs after Friends of Trees’ Green Space Initiative, in which volunteers restore natural areas and public right-of-ways, and after Friends of Trees’ Neighborhood Trees program, which organizes weekend community plantings in which neighbors plant street and yard trees together.

“We were impressed with the quality of the training and the quality of the work,” Burke said of the Friends of Trees Crew Leader Training that he and a colleague attended last fall. “It was a great feeling with all the people planting together. We really wanted to bring that down to Eugene.”

Last month, Meyer Memorial Trust made 80 awards for more than $3 million to nonprofit organizations in Oregon and Clark County, Washington. More than three-fourths of the grants (and just over $1 million) were made under MMT’s Grassroots Grants program. The most recent awards bring the total amount funded by MMT since it began operating in 1982 to nearly $535 million.

The coming October-to-April planting season marks the 22nd year that Friends of Trees has brought people in the Portland-Vancouver area together to plant and care for city trees and green spaces. To date, we have planted more than 415,000 trees and native plants.

To learn more about the Eugene Tree Foundation, visit www.EugeneTreeFoundation.org. For more information about Friends of Trees, visit www.FriendsofTrees.org.