Neighborhood Trees

Neighborhood Tree Planting in Portland this Season!

Friends of Trees is partnering with Portland Parks & Recreation Urban Forestry to plant trees in priority neighborhoods

This planting season, Friends of Trees and Portland Parks & Recreation Urban Forestry are launching a new $1.8 million partnership to plant and care for 750 trees across Portland’s most heat-vulnerable neighborhoods. This collaboration is part of the City’s Equitable Tree Canopy program funded by the Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund (PCEF), and reflects a shared commitment to climate resilience, community stewardship, and long-term tree health.

Over the next three years, Friends of Trees and our volunteer community will plant, water, and care for 750 street and yard trees, with a focus on neighborhoods in North and East Portland that have less canopy and greater exposure to heat risks. All trees will be free to recipients.

Go to our Get a Tree page to find out if your home is in our planting area. Neighborhoods listed below!

Friends of Trees has maintained an active presence in Portland since our onset in 1989, with different partnership iterations with the City of Portland and others. For example, our Green Space program partners with Portland Parks & Recreation to restore natural areas. And Portland Urban Forestry is part of an 11-member coalition led by Friends of Trees that was awarded a $12 million Urban and Community Forestry Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“Friends of Trees is excited to work with Portland Urban Forestry to bring people together to protect and grow the canopy. It’s about more than planting. It’s about centering community in the process, creating connections between people and the trees.”
-Yashar Vasef , Executive Director at Friends of Trees.

“Our partnership with Friends of Trees prioritizes equity and shared impact,” said Jenn Cairo, Portland City Forester. “We’re working together to plant trees in neighborhoods that need them most and helping make sure new trees survive and grow in hotter, drier summers.”

Every street tree planted through this partnership will receive three years of follow-up care. This includes watering, monitoring, and replacement if needed. Yard tree recipients will receive guidance and support to help care for their trees and support long-term success.

“With this revitalized partnership, we’re prioritizing post-planting care to make sure these trees survive and thrive for the community’s benefit,” Yashar says.

We’re excited to work with Portland Urban Forestry to focus on priority neighborhoods. Together, we are removing some of the barriers to planting trees by offering the trees for free, watering street trees, and supporting tree establishment in those crucial first few years. It’s an opportunity to plant trees where they’re needed most and will require thoughtful outreach and engagement.

PORTLAND NEIGHBORHOOD PLANTINGS THIS SEASON

December 6, 2025

East Columbia, Kenton, Piedmont, Portsmouth, St. Johns, Woodlawn

January 17, 2026

Boise-Eliot, Buckman, Humboldt, Kerns, King, Lloyd District

March 7, 2026

Centennial, Glenfair, Hazelwood, Mill Park, Montavilla, Powellhurst-Gilbert

March 21, 2026

Argay Terrace, Parkrose, Parkrose Heights, Russell, Wilkes

Visit our website to find out if your address is in our planting areas and sign up for a tree! You can also check out this map. You can sign up to volunteer at any of our volunteer planting events throughout Western Oregon and Southwest Washington on our planting calendar.

Community

Building a Community Coalition

Our $12 million grant is funding community equity work in Portland, Gresham, Eugene, and Springfield

We believe everyone deserves to experience the benefits of trees in urban landscapes. Trees and green spaces keep neighborhoods cool, support pollinators and ecosystem services, and even bolster mental health and well-being. Yet despite these benefits, tree canopy cover isn’t equitably distributed across communities and geographies, dividing most cities into high- and low-canopy neighborhoods. These low-canopy neighborhoods are often home to historically disadvantaged communities, who now bear the brunt of climate impacts when extreme weather strikes.

Last year, an 11-member coalition led by Friends of Trees was awarded a $12 million Urban and Community Forestry Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This program is investing over $1 billion nationwide to help increase equitable access to nature and the benefits of urban trees for communities most impacted by climate change, pollution, and environmental hazards.

Over the course of the five-year grant, our coalition will work to empower disadvantaged, low-canopy neighborhoods to expand their tree canopy by participating in urban forest planning processes, creating culturally-relevant educational and knowledge-exchange opportunities, and hosting community planting and tree care events.

The driving theme of the grant project is coalition building. We are so excited to work closely with our 10 community partners on this project: APANO, Black Parent Initiative, City of Gresham, City of Portland, Columbia Slough Watershed Council, Connecting Canopies, Depave, POIC, Verde, and Wisdom of the Elders.

Launching a project of this size is no simple task, and the coalition has been hard at work thoughtfully creating strategies and collaboratively planning activities to make this work a reality. The partners have assembled a coordinating committee and are collectively working on a coalition charter to set the course for the project.

Engaging community members is fundamental to the success of this project, which is why the coalition includes such a diverse array of community organizations, each with their own unique connection to the people they serve. To support planning and implementing our collaborative community engagement efforts, we’ve added a Community Coordinator to the team—Sia Hanna!

“For me, community engagement is all about commitment and relationship,” Sia says. “It’s a commitment to working alongside community members in our collective efforts to improve well-being and vibrancy within and between people and the places we call home. I believe humans are part of the ecology of place. If we are not deeply tending to each, then we do a disservice to both.”

The efforts behind the scene have led to the beginning of work on the ground: Friends of Trees has already hosted four pruning events in Eugene and Springfield that, without USDA funding, would not have been possible.

Now, we move into planting season, and our coalition project is a huge part of it. This grant is helping fund our upcoming planting events in Eugene, Springfield, NE Portland, and Gresham.

You can join us for one of two volunteer planting events on Saturday, November 23rd. We have a green space planting at the gorgeous Wilkes Creek Headwaters in NE Portland, where we will plant native shrubs to enhance this important natural area.

We will also be planting trees in Gresham neighborhoods, helping to build much needed urban canopy that will shade community members. Before the planting event that Saturday afternoon, we have a Crew Leader training—you can sign up to help lead planting crews!

Check out our calendar to sign up to volunteer.

Funding for this project provided by the USDA Forest Service, Urban and Community Forestry Program. USDA and Friends of Trees are equal opportunity providers and employers.

Eugene

Building on a Foundation of Equity Work in Eugene & Springfield

One of the great things about kicking the season off with pruning events is that you get to see the progress of trees planted in years past, and it provides a renewed vision of how each new tree will grow and provide benefits to the community.

“We were pruning trees in a neighborhood north of downtown Springfield,” says Eugene Director Erik Burke, “and it’s really satisfying to see street trees in almost every available spot, spots that were empty of trees a few years ago.”

Our Friends of Trees Eugene team just finished 4 volunteer pruning events before they move into the planting season.

“It’s great to see the trees doing well, and pruning is just so much fun,” Erik says. “I had a blast pruning some climate resilient trees we planted back in 2013, all live oaks.”

The trees that volunteers pruned had already been pruned once, but thanks to funding from the USDA Forest Service grant, we were able to prune them again.

“Trees really need more than one round of pruning,” Erik says. “It’s a very cost effective way to make sure that the trees achieve a healthy structure. And we want to prune them before they get pruned by a truck or an ice storm.”

Caring for trees is just as important as planting them, especially when it comes to addressing areas in need of trees. Planting and caring for trees where they’re needed most is foundational to our work in Eugene and Springfield, even before the Eugene Tree Foundation joined Friends of Trees.

“We’ve always planted with equity in mind,” says Eugene-Springfield Program Manager Taylor Glass. “There are so many places that need trees and there’s still so much work to be done.”

Planting season is just around the corner, and the USDA grant is funding much of this season’s planting in West Eugene and Springfield, as they are included in the Justice40 initiative, which serves communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.

“When you go to certain areas and you only see one or two trees on a block, you can feel it,” Erik says. “It feels good to plant trees in those places.”

Trees

Save Our State’s Urban Trees from Tree Code Rollback

Governor Kotek’s HPAC proposes overriding tree codes in favor of development.

Governor Kotek’s Housing Production Advisory Council (HPAC) is currently planning to bring forward recommendations that include the overriding of tree codes for plots smaller than 6,000 square feet, which will explicitly allow clear cutting of trees under 48″ diameter, which includes the vast majority of urban trees. This recommendation stands in stark contrast to work taking place throughout the state and nation to increase tree cover as a key tool for growing climate-resilient cities. Read more here.

HPAC has a hearing on Friday, September 29th where this facet of their proposal will be discussed.

We recognize the urgent need for affordable housing, but housing and trees should not be mutually exclusive. Friends of Trees, the Shade Equity Coalition (we’re a member!), and many other environmental organizations around the state believe the proposal is unnecessarily pitting the housing and climate emergencies against one another. Unfortunately, this advisory body in question does not have a representative from the environmental justice sector to speak to shade equity, climate change, and the myriad of benefits urban trees provide to Oregonians. This is our chance to voice our concerns.

HOW TO TESTIFY

Since it is difficult to testify at the hearing itself, please make sure to submit written testimony to: [email protected] and copy [email protected].

Suggested Talking Points from Trees for Life Oregon

—At a time of climate crisis, throwing climate- and tree-related regulations out the window is a misguided, short-sighted way to speed up housing construction—and a sure way to guarantee that the state and its cities and towns will be unable to meet their own planned climate and canopy goals.

—Many factors affect developers’ ability to build more affordable housing faster. Tree protections are hardly key among them. Portland’s tree code gives developers the option of paying fees to remove trees in lieu of preserving them. Builders have been paying these fees as they do other business expenses, deeming them worth it in order to build more revenue-generating units or a larger single home whose price will more than cover any tree-removal fees they might have paid. Moreover, simply doing away with tree protections will not guarantee that builders will create more affordable housing.

—We oppose HPAC’s proposal to essentially override municipal tree codes like Portland’s that took many people many years and much effort to put into place. Tree codes were created to ensure Oregon remains a livable place we can all be proud to live in. The Portland tree code, for one, was in the end strongly influenced by developers and is already weak as is.

—We oppose HPAC’s recommendations to erode state and local wetland and environmental zone protections. Such changes will certainly impact trees.

—Governor Kotek’s HPAC is proposing to do away with environment regulations that developers have wanted to eliminate for years. When selecting HPAC’s members Governor Kotek did not include broader voices that would reflect the reality that we are facing both a housing and a climate crisis, and that both need to be addressed in an integrated way.

We hope you’ll take this opportunity to let your voice be heard.

Community

Coalition Led by Friends of Trees Awarded $12M Community Forestry Grant

Friends of Trees | FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

For more information:
Friends of Trees: Yashar Vasef, Executive Director; [email protected]

Please contract coalition members for more information about their organization’s specific project role and activities (details below)

Portland, Ore. (9-14-23) — An 11-member coalition led by Friends of Trees was awarded a $12 million Urban and Community Forestry Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The grant will fund the engagement of low canopy neighborhoods included in the Biden-Harris Administration’s Justice40 initiative, which will bring resources to communities most impacted by climate change, pollution, and environmental hazards.

The partner coalition includes APANO, Black Parent Initiative, City of Gresham, City of Portland, Columbia Slough Watershed Council, Connecting Canopies, Depave, POIC, Verde, and Wisdom of the Elders. The $12 million award will direct funds to these partners and Friends of Trees across five years. This is a partial award, as the original request was for $17.5 million, and the details of the award have not yet been provided.

The coalition’s proposal includes funding for community forestry work including tree planting, natural area restoration, post-planting care, community education, opportunities for direct community input and participation, and workforce training.

“This award is a validation of community tree planting as a model,” says Friends of Trees Executive Director Yashar Vasef. “Especially in the face of intensifying climate change, authentic community partnerships have a huge part to play in growing and maintaining our urban forests.”

The project includes:

  • community tree planting (training and engaging volunteers) to plant up to 2,300 street and yard trees and 21,000 native shrubs in neighborhoods and natural areas, specifically in identified equity areas: East Multnomah County, West Eugene, and Springfield
  • robust post-planting care, including watering, mulching, and natural area maintenance
  • community education
  • opportunities for direct community input and participation
  • workforce training

In addition to community tree planting and tree care, thousands of additional trees and native shrubs will be planted and cared for by coalition partners through other methods.

“This project represents a tremendous investment in growing our community’s canopy,” Vasef says. “That means engaging the community in efforts to both plant and care for trees.”

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that the USDA’s Forest Service is awarding more than $1 billion in competitive grants to plant and maintain trees, combat extreme heat and climate change, and improve access to nature. Friends of Trees’ partner application is one of 385 proposals that were accepted across the nation.

In addition to affirming the effectiveness of the community tree planting model, this award demonstrates that policymakers are listening to the science. It’s widely accepted that trees play a vital role in combating climate change and providing public health benefits. A recent study using 14 years of Friends of Trees planting data associates neighborhood tree planting with fewer deaths.

“This isn’t just the coalition’s award, this is our communities’ award,” says Vasef. “This coalition represents a broad, diverse cross section of our communities, and these communities will be directly involved with, and will directly benefit from, this project.”

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Friends of Trees (FriendsofTrees.org)
Friends of Trees inspires people to improve the natural world around them through a simple solution: Planting Trees. Together.

Friends of Trees was founded in 1989 by a local community member who loved trees and started planting them in neighborhoods. Today, Friends of Trees is a nationally recognized, regional leader in improving the urban tree canopy and restoring sensitive natural areas—through programs delivered by thousands of volunteers. Friends of Trees has planted 945,000+ trees and native plants in neighborhoods and natural areas in six counties across two states in the 35 years since its founding. Learn more about The Friends of Trees Way.

Please contract coalition members for more information about their organization’s specific project role and activities: