FOT volunteer honored by national nonprofit

It may be hard to believe, but some Friends of Trees volunteers have helped us year after year since our founding in 1989. Jim Gersbach is one of those dedicated volunteers. His longtime, diverse and visionary contributions to Portland’s city forest inspired the national nonprofit ACTrees to choose him as the runner-up for the ACTrees 2012 Volunteer of the Year Award.

In announcing the award this week, ACTrees noted Jim’s decades of “educating about the importance of a healthy, diverse urban forest not just now, but far in to the future and particularly in the face of a changing climate.”

Jim’s goal is to educate people about the importance of choosing the right tree not only for themselves, but for future generations. For the past seven years, he has given multiple tree selection slideshows to the public every fall. He helped establish mini-arboretums at two Portland public schools, creating a diverse tree canopy to offset the loss of trees in the neighborhood, and he led the effort to create the NE Ainsworth Linear Arboretum to introduce species diversity and to educate Portlanders about their street trees. In 2005 he received the Bill Naito Community Trees Award from the city of Portland for establishing the arboretum and for his other contributions to our urban forest. He also helped create the Cully-Concordia International Grove.

Jim has been a neighborhood coordinator in his Concordia neighborhood and served on the FOT board of directors. As a crew leader, he continues to guide groups of volunteers at weekend neighborhood plantings.

Jim is also a neighborhood tree steward for the city of Portland and helped found the Concordia Tree Team, one of the first neighborhood-based, tree advocacy groups in Portland assisting with Friends of Trees.

Congratulations to Jim for earning this national recognition! We’ll undoubtedly benefit from his commitment to our city forest for many years to come.