Trees In Trust: Saving our forest one piece at a time

Charlottetown – Trees In Trust has the perfect green gift. For a donation of $30, you can dedicate a piece of woodland to someone special. Your donation is used by a charitable land trust to purchase and preserve endangered forest in the Maritimes.

Your dedication lasts a lifetime and you receive a dedication certificate and a map of your piece of woodland.  Also, because it’s all done on the Internet, no paper is used – except for the certificate which you print yourself – and that makes it all the more environmentally friendly.

A new partnership between conservation groups and the latest web technology is aiming to encourage many more people to invest in the future of our native forest. Island Nature Trust and Trees In Trust have recently joined forces to launch a web-based system on PEI which re-packages forest conservation as a gift, memorial or carbon offset product.

With global warming, carbon offsets and personal environmental responsibility in the news so much, the timing couldn’t be better for a service that takes forest conservation, packages it and makes it available to everyone in such an attractive form. “Traditionally, land trusts have raised funds from conservation minded individuals” says Andrew Lush, founder of Trees In Trust. “What we are doing is providing the means for land trusts to raise funds from many more sources”.

In exchange for a donation, Trees In Trust provides a mapped piece of forest and a dedication certificate, all instantly via the web. “I spent $30 on a piece of woodland for my son’s birthday” says Frank MacEachern of Charlottetown. “Once he saw where it was on a map, he was really intrigued”. Your own piece of forest is then held in your name in perpetuity.

Trees In Trust is already in negotiations with the Nature Trust of New Brunswick and trusts in three other provinces, and the service will be available across Canada by the end of the year. The system allows land trusts to acquire more endangered forest while also concentrating on what they do best, rather than spending time on publicity, handling payments, printing maps and certificates. Income tax receipts can even be printed on-line by the donor. Land trusts, such as Island Nature Trust, can seamlessly incorporate the technology into their own websites for their own fundraising.