Tag: Blueprint Foundation
Garry Spreads the Seeds of Service for MLK Day
Dear Diary,
Volunteers are sort of like wildflowers. Each one is lovely and unique, but when you see a whole field of them, it’s totally, mind-blowingly beautiful. Seeing a huge group of volunteers together warms my heart on even the chilliest morning. And when they’re planting wildflowers? It can’t get any better than that.
Last weekend, I felt inspired to do something kinda wild myself. I went to three Friends of Trees planting events all in the same morning. This was an especially special morning, the weekend right before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The spirit of service really fills my canopy around MLK Day. Of course I love seeing volunteers almost every week at Friends of Trees planting events, but I really love that so many people are eager to make a difference in honor of Dr. King.
I started my morning in Forest Grove (what a great name for a town, right?) Volunteers gathered at Stites Nature Park to plant, you guessed it, wildflowers! I am a friend of native plants as much as I am a friend of trees, and our Green Space program gives me the perfect chance to hang out with some of my native plant buddies. We were planting red columbine, showy milkweed, Oregon iris, tiger lily, and more! The morning started off frosty, but the sun was out, shining on the volunteers and wildflowers that will bloom come spring. I literally cannot wait.
From there I went back home, to the Friends of Trees office, because we were staging an event there! Volunteers were planting in neighborhoods along the MLK corridor, perfect for this weekend of service. Our new partnership with the City of Portland is focused on planting trees to grow canopy where it’s needed most, in the most heat-vulnerable neighborhoods. So even though it’s winter now, we’re always thinking about those hot summer days and the shade trees can provide to the community. Volunteers can see their impact right away when they look at a tree they just planted, but that impact continues to grow and grow as the tree does.
It just feels so good to plant trees in my own neighborhood. Highly recommend if you get the chance. And City Councilor Elana Pirtle-Guiney agrees! We were stoked to have her at the event talking to our volunteers about why their work is so important.
“Look at the beautiful trees loaded up in these trucks,” Councilor Pirtle-Guiney said to the volunteers before they headed out to plant. “You’re going to some neighborhoods right near where I live, and there are blocks there that absolutely need these beautiful trees.”
We had some of our incredible community partners there too. The Blueprint Foundation and Wisdom of the Elders both brought crews. We also had a table set up for voter registration! One of the things I love about volunteers is that they are some of the most active citizens! Talk about wildflowers spreading seeds, am I right?
My last stop: more wildflowers. I popped over to the Columbia Slough Natural Area for the other Green Space event of the morning. I really love this place because it is a much needed slice of nature in the middle of an industrial area, right along the Columbia Slough, which is such an important waterway for my wildlife friends. Our friends from POIC were there leading crews, showing us what the next generation of environmental stewards is capable of.
I couldn’t help but bask in the good vibes of this place and the spirit of the people so committed to volunteering their time and energy to make our world a little bit better, one wildflower at a time.
Tree-mendously yours,
Garry
P.S. Read my whole diary here!
P.P.S. You can support these good vibes and good trees by donating!
Exploring New Neighborhoods and New Skills
Our youth pruning program provides hands-on experience to POIC and Blueprint participants
On a Wednesday morning at Alberta Park in Northeast Portland, young folks from the Blueprint Foundation and POIC (Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center) gather for a pruning event. They’ve been doing this for a few weeks, so there’s a lovely familiarity. While they wait to start, they’re chatting with their friends, exploring the park, and enjoying the cool morning air ahead of what will be a hot day.
Eventually, we circle up, and Friends of Trees staff review the pruning process in the form of trivia, complete with gummy bear rewards. The POIC and Blueprint students really know their stuff, Quentin in particular, who earns plenty of gummy bears that he redistributes among his team. Like Quentin, many of the POIC folks have been working with Friends of Trees for a while, leading crews at planting events during the planting season.
The week before, graduates from our Adult Urban Forestry Workforce Training Program (AUF) walked through the neighborhood around Alberta Park, identifying street trees in need of pruning, and labeling those trees with a tag. This week, POIC and Blueprint students will join the AUF grads to revisit those trees, and with the guidance of a Pruning Leader or Friends of Trees staff, they’ll get out their pruners and prune those trees! This week, two AUF grads co-led a crew, a role they prepared for by attending pruning events last season.
“It’s really rewarding seeing the AUF grads step into the Pruning Leader role,” says Mario Catani, Neighborhood Trees Specialist.
This summer has a total of four youth pruning events in North, Northeast, and East Portland neighborhoods, with funding from Metro’s Nature in Neighborhoods program. Our youth pruning program started in 2021 and has continued to evolve, with graduates from our Adult Urban Forestry Workforce Training program serving as mentors and Pruning Leaders. All the participants are paid for their time.
“It’s getting more and more intentional and meaningful each year,” says Community Tree Care Coordinator Litzy Venturi.
“This is an awesome way for us to work with Blueprint and POIC youth in the summertime,” says Workforce Development Manager Rudy Roquemore. “It’s a really cool opportunity to get to know each other in a more intimate setting.”
In this intimate setting, pruning is a collaborative effort. We split into groups and head out into the neighborhood with our list of addresses. When we locate a tagged tree, we take time to look at it and talk through the potential issues. Things like suckers, dead branches, crossing or rubbing branches, and co-dominant leaders. And together, students figure out how to address these issues in order of priority, while staying within the budget of pruning no more than 25% of the canopy.
“It’s awesome to revisit some of these neighborhoods to prune trees and to introduce the youth participants to different parts of the city,” Litzy says.
Lashay Gates, a Program Assistant at Blueprint, was a program participant herself before becoming a mentor and now serving in her current position. So she knows firsthand the value of this program for the students, beyond the joy of helping a tree.
“I love working with youth and getting outside,” Lashay says. “You’re outside with more people who look like you.”
For the students, the pleasures of pruning can be simple. Being outside, learning new skills, or just the satisfaction of making a good cut that shapes the tree for future success.
“I like the cutting part,” says Aiden from POIC. “It’s very stress relieving.”
One tree down, onto the next, and after a couple quick hours and half a dozen trees, a well-earned lunch in the park.
Trees Through The Years
Our inspection program connects volunteers to specific trees, visit after visit.
When Friends of Trees plants a tree, we don’t just wash the dirt off of our hands and move onto the next one. We return to inspect it, to prune it, replenish mulch, and make sure everything is looking good. These check-ups are for more than just to care for that individual tree—we’re also collecting data.
Most of the data that we track is for younger trees, Tiers 1, 2, and 3, according to their age, Tier 1 being trees that were planted in the most recent season. We do this to make sure each tree was planted properly, to track the survival rates of different species, assess the quality of the nursery stock, and keep an eye out for any trends we need to adapt to.
“We also do this to provide tree care advice to the tree recipient,” Haley says. If a tree fails for reasons beyond neglect, we can replace the tree or refund the recipient.
There’s another set of much older trees that we have been collecting data on: Tier Omega. Tier Omega trees were planted in the 2010 season, and we’ve been checking on a subset of them, the same exact subset, every year since they were planted. This has created a consistent and robust data set that can show the long term survival rates of older plantings.
In the summer of 2010, 486 Tier Omega trees were planted. Since then, just 45 trees from the Tier Omega subset have died or were moved due to development reasons. Now that these trees have settled, they’re less likely to be dramatically impacted by weather, so we have been seeing fewer dead trees with each round of inspections.
“There’s this great community feel to it,” Neighborhood Trees Senior Specialist Haley Miller says about the inspection program. “We have some Tier Omega inspectors who have been inspecting the same exact trees for eleven years now.”
Mike Ablutz is one of those Tier Omega inspectors who just keeps coming back. “Revisiting the same trees over several years is like checking in with young friends,” he says. “I love seeing how they are doing, how fast they are growing, and discovering the many ways that they are adapting to life’s challenges.”
When people sign up to get a tree from Friends of Trees, they can volunteer to be tree inspectors. They are assigned a Tier 1 route of about twenty trees, including their own, that need to be inspected twice each summer. Inspectors monitor things like weeds, mulch, and water. They measure the size of the tree and look for things like bark damage. “It’s a popular volunteer role,” Haley says. “People really enjoy visiting their trees.”
The tree inspection process is also one of the ways we engage our youth education programming at Friends of Trees. Our partnerships with the Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center and the Blueprint Foundation connect students and young people to urban forestry work. In the summer, they get to help with tree inspection, which continues to develop forestry skills like tree identification, and grow their connections to nature.
We are learning more and more that when a person feels a connection to a particular tree, it grows their connection to trees and nature more broadly. Our tree inspectors are proof of that.
“I often imagine how the young trees we plant will look when they are old,” Mike says. “Tier Omega inspections allow me to revisit specific trees and at least see how they are doing in their early years.” Hopefully Mike will get the chance to keep revisiting those trees for years to come.
Support our community partners
If you viewed any of our Earth Month events (here’s the playlist) you probably noticed that we often talk about partnerships and climate justice. Friends of Trees’ community includes partnerships with a number of truly impactful local organizations that work with underserved communities. Underserved communities experience the worst effects of climate change and our partnerships that help connect communities to the benefits of trees play an important role in achieving climate justice.
We have a special request of you: Support our community partners. Yes, Friends of Trees will always need you, but if we are going to achieve true climate justice we all need to support Black, Indigenous or People of Color (BIPOC) organizations that are part of the movement to ensure equitable outcomes around trees and the urban canopy.
These organizations are Friends of Trees’ partners and need your support:
Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO): Uniting Asians and Pacific Islanders to achieve social justice.
The Blueprint Foundation: Uplift, educate, and support the development of black-identified youth and other communities of color.
Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center (POIC): Committed to the success of underserved youth and adults.
Wisdom of the Elders: Native American cultural sustainability, multimedia education and race reconciliation.
If you’d like to learn more about how Friends of Trees partners with these organizations visit our website here.
Thank you for supporting our work and the work of our partners, and for being a part of the Friends of Trees community.