• Organizing and purchasing tools needed for the volunteers and placing
them at pre-determined job sites
• Making sites safe using barricades, traffic control, etc.
• Enlisting local non-profit groups to display their information at the
event (e.g. Friends of Fish)
We have been doing this Arbor Day/Earth Day celebration for more
than ten years. I would prefer we planted one tree (without all the fan-
fare that the larger event brings), but the current setup makes a bigger
splash with the community.
For one event we planted an understory of native plants in a reclaimed
natural area with about 1500 tree seedlings/saplings and several thou-
sand shrubs. That area had been a carpet of blackberry; we removed
the blackberry using a Washington State grant that provided a conser-
vation corps crew to hand-dig the blackberry several months before the
event. The conservation corps employees came back to help with the
planting.
We also do some smaller side events occasionally; one year we helped
a neighborhood plant 16 street trees (funded by a City neighborhood
grant), involving a nearby kindergarten class in planting one of the
trees.
(below) The Arbor Day/Earth Day
t-shirt design for Renton
(bottom) Some of the 97 volunteers
and City staff at the after-party follow-
ing tree, shrub, flower planting and
lunch.
