Crowdfunding
Communities can now crowdfund street trees.
Trees for Streets started out helping individual residents sponsor trees to be planted in their streets, often outside their own homes. This has worked really well, however we’re also experiencing demand from communities for a way to come together to collectively fund street tree planting. These include raising funds for entire residential streets, schools streets and for less affluent, less treed, parts of towns.
As a charity, we want to support this type of community action, and that’s why we’ve launched our new crowdfunding service.
Last year we beta tested our crowdfunding platform, with communities successfully funding two large street projects in Croydon and Haringey.
We’re now open for new campaigns, which will be delivered in the winter 23/24 planting season.
This is being offered to communities in the towns where we currently have partnerships with local councils, for the simple reason, it is these local authorities who plant and maintain these trees. These include: Bedford, Bradford, Bristol, Cambridge, Coventry, Gloucestershire , Sheffield and in London, we work with Barnet, Croydon, Ealing, Haringey, Harrow, Hillingdon, Islington and Tower Hamlets.
We’ve seen three main themes emerging from our recent work: Green-my-Street, School Street and Community Trees.
There are many streets that desperately need greening, where there are few or no trees at all. Often there are strong street communities who would love to have the opportunity to come together to starting raising funds to green up their street.
This can be an activity that happens in small steps, or a big bang planting of 20 + trees.
If you’d like to green your street, drop us a line using the form below.
More councils are recognising the need to improve the quality of our walk-to-school routes. They know they need to encourage more walking and they understand the need to green-up their school streets.
Some local authorities help parents close school streets during pick-up and drop-off times to actively reduce pollution and encourage walking. We’d like to help you work with your local authority to raise funds to plant more trees in these streets.
Most of the councils we’re supporting have locations within their boroughs that are ‘more’ in need of new street trees. These may be areas with lower tree canopy, lower affluence, near schools and busy polluted roads. Our crowdfund service allows residents and local business to make donations towards these trees.
This is a simple way that councils can raise new funding for these priority locations.
If you live in one of our participating council areas, and you’d like to get involved, then we’d love to hear from you.
We’ll ask your council whether it would be viable to plant at your suggested location. If it is, and there is enough support locally to run a campaign, then you will be able to take on job of managing this locally. But don’t worry we’ll be on hand to help.
We ask that crowdfund campaigns are for a minimum of 8 trees and that there is evidence of a strong community support.
It may be the case that the council may be willing to underwrite 2 or more trees as part of your campaign. We’d expect that you’ll be able to encourage other residents and local businesses to support your campaign.
Each scheme of planting is on land owned and managed by your council. They are responsible for planting the tree, and maintaining it. They own these trees. Trees for Streets makes it possible for communities to easily funds for these trees. Your council has to survey the location and verify that the scheme can go ahead.
Please note it make take a few weeks to get a decision from your local council, and we will ask you questions to help verify your proposal.
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