This machete grows trees!

Dear Friends,

As the rainy season wraps up and we celebrate the end of the year, I would like to express my gratitude to you for helping us to further restore forests. Your support for this campaign is also helping us to build on our digital platform that will enable us to grown millions of trees through the leadership of small-scale farmers and youth. 

During this summer and fall, your support enabled us to plant 350 native trees at two properties in the Paso del Istmo Wildlife Corridor in southwestern Nicaragua. At the same time, we worked across six properties to patrol and protect 500 acres of forests where we had planted native trees in 2007.  We also managed reforestation at a property recently reforested, known as the Mono Bayo Reserve. There we removed weeds and prevented wildfires. We have seen the positive impact of this habitat restoration efforts. Just last week, our rangers photographed this puma (see attached) resting in the forested areas of the property. Your support helps us to sustain the diverse trees in the forest, and the fauna that depends on it. Thank you.

I am also thrilled to share more on the progress we are making on building a digital platform that will help to connect youth and farmers in a join campaign to restore forests. We are calling the project the Machete Project, because this traditional agriculture tool can be transformed into a force for farmer-mediated restoration of forests by using it to prune trees, promote regrowth, and removing weedy competitors.

We have spent the past eight months working on design details with a digital team from the software company SoftServe. The programmers in Eastern Europe, including the country of Ukraine. There have been some delays due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but we are nearing a product which we can pilot to help build a movement around tropical forest restoration.  This is a new idea and an important puzzle piece for mitigating climate change in a way that considers rural people and the young generation. Our progress on the machete project has only been possible thanks to people like you. Thank you. I look forward to sharing what comes next as we begin testing it on the ground in several tropical countries. 

In the meantime, I wish you happy holidays. Thank you for helping to grow forests in Central America and beyond.

Your truly,

Sarah