Our outlook on this year
What an incredible start to the new year it has been - we moved into a beautiful new office, created tree couples for Valentine’s Day and - on the same day - celebrated our goal of having planted 1,000,000 trees in ten years! We have worked with over 60,000 farmers and their families across 16 different countries - most of those in the Southern Hemisphere. One other important project was in collaboration with Libera Terra, an organisation in Italy that redevelops seized mafia assets and encourages organic farming. The results of this project include the creation of a sustainable production and trading chain that has a positive impact on society and on those same seized assets, which have become free croplands and are used to create high quality products using eco-friendly methods. Another great success we were able to celebrate within the last few years was the opening of multiple new projects, including a handful in Kenya, Tanzania, Colombia and Guatemala. Here, we are working to establish sustainable farming, fight deforestation and soil erosion, and improve the use of natural resources.
Apart from that, our business is expanding! We are leaving behind our beloved garden where we have been working for over 4 years, expanding our team and growing our business, moving on to bigger and better things. Not far from our old “home” we will be working out of a typical Tuscan villa surrounded by what we love most: nature. Alongside peach, orange and olive trees (and a small greenhouse) we will work hard to make the world a greener place - much like the world just outside our door.
If someone had told us 10 years ago that this would be where we are right before our 10th anniversary, we would have laughed - both Tommaso and Federico, who started our company many years ago, had high hopes - but even the wildest of dreams don’t come close to the reality we are currently living. This is not only because we are moving to the new office, but also because we are planning on opening four more markets, including Spain, France, Scandinavia and the Benelux union. By the end of the year, we are looking to grow our small team to around 50 members (something we could never have predicted!) and, in the hunt for our newest team members, we are hoping to provide an even better platform for our community, better service for our partners and even more trees for our world.
With more people working with us to make the planet greener, we are excited to share more updates from our projects, hopefully including video footage (as we did for our Tanzanian Special Edition trees), keeping our community included even more - in the tree planting process, the growth of the trees, the benefits of each species and how we are helping each region with our projects. These steps will hopefully help to make our efforts even more transparent and tangible.
We are also incredibly excited to be celebrating our 10 year anniversary in June this year - and with over 1,000,000 trees planted, more than 62,000 farmers included and a growing community of more than 400,000 people, it has been quite a decade! Achieving these goals definitely doesn’t mean we are about to stop now. We are still working towards a greener planet - with more biodiversity, sustainable farming and reforestation. The second million? It is our aim to plant a massive 10 million trees by the end of 2022, so we are doing everything we can to plant it soon. Together, #LetsGreenThePlanet
