Farewell, Elbel!

After six years at Friends of Trees, our esteemed colleague Elizabeth Elbel is moving to the next step in her career, having taken a position to help keep our air clean with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

Elizabeth joined Friends of Trees as an AmeriCorps member in 2008. Her first year, she spent a lot of time at Gresham City Hall and was instrumental in expanding our program east of Portland. The next year we snatched her up to be a full-time staffer on our Neighborhood Trees team. As Neighborhood Trees Senior Specialist and certified arborist, Elizabeth was responsible for sourcing thousands of trees for people’s homes from area wholesale nurseries—an enormous task that she took on with ease.

When she was not ordering trees, Elbel was busy supporting neighborhood volunteers, our Neighborhood Coordinators in planning their annual neighborhood plantings throughout Portland. In addition, she helped to build our new Friends of Trees planting program in Salem.

But her time with Friends of Trees goes all the way back to the beginning of our organization, when she was only 5 years old and attended Boise Elementary. As written up in this Oregonian article, Elizabeth and her Kindergarten classmates helped Friends of Trees plant a sugar maple in 1989 (our very first planting season) that still grows today next to the school’s playground.

Elizabeth will be greatly missed, as will her loyal Doberman, Cedar, who came to the office most days. Good luck Elbel!