Success in 2024!
2024 is the year that we got all our ducks in a row. Ducks are a little ungainly taking off, but once they pick up speed they become more elegant and acrobatic.
It was an immensely productive year for our mutual aid network, with new projects and new partners coming on board. Take a look at the brochure below - we share it with people interested in how our partners in traditional communities restore landscapes, and how our network is inspired by mycelia. If you like what we’re doing, please share it with others!
New projects
This year we secured three major projects in Brazil that directly advance our mission of holistic land restoration and community empowerment with Indigenous groups and quilombos (settlements of formerly enslaved people): one is an agroforestry project with the largest quilombo in Brazil, and another quilombo project is as part of a collective planting hundreds of thousands of mangroves in the mouth of the Amazon. There are over 3000 quilombos in Brazil, with their own powerful cultures of resilience, and almost no NGOs running successful projects with them. Success here could be replicated across these networks and lead to massive impacts.
The third major initiative is the new phase of the Trees of Music project, partnering with the Pataxó Indigenous nation to create a vital ecological corridor in the Atlantic Forest by planting the endangered brazilwood tree (well known to musicians, as it is used to make violin bows).
More details on projects here.
Businesses supporting regeneration
The other success is that we have several new business partnerships. SMC Coach Hire, the second biggest coach booking operator in the UK, came on board via their charity arm Green Paw. As well as supporting the quilombo projects, each of the thousand enquiries they receive every day is an opportunity to introduce holistic regeneration to the public, so we’re about to start training their sales team to get excited about trees.
They join our longterm supporter David Harber Ltd as a business that is helping to make a difference to lives and ecosystems in Brazil.
We also won a further three new contracts since October, when we took on a new staff member and began a business development campaign. We will be sharing details of these new businesses soon.
Get involved?
This is a critical moment in the growth of our network, a truly egalitarian and mycelial way of doing mutual aid outside of traditional structures. We can plant trees at a competitive rate, because without a series of middle men, much more of your money goes into planting trees. Please take a look at our brochure to see how we work, and get in touch if you’d like to hear more.
