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Five hundred trees planted in the park on the city's doorstep, in holes the young volunteers dug themselves.
02About this project
Nairobi is the only capital city in the world with a national park inside its limits, and keeping that park alive is a civic as much as a conservation task. In October 2021 the foundation and the youth of Stand Up Shout Out spent days in the park digging the holes, the hard physical part of tree planting, before an event that put 500 trees into the ground. The project was designed by Olga Levari and Trish Heather Hayes, two women who have long made the park their business.
It was part of something larger. That May the foundation had joined a national greening campaign with SUSO, the Kenya Forest Service and the National Youth Council, which planted 30,000 seedlings across more than ten Kenyan towns and cities on a single day and aimed at 400,000 seedlings before the end of June 2021.
Planting is only the beginning of a tree's life. The pattern set here, with young people growing, planting and then tending what they put in the ground, became the way the foundation works with trees wherever it works.