Coordinating Volunteers

Coordinating Volunteers

After developing a local vision and connecting this with a larger, city-wide greening strategy, we enter a new phase in which volunteers are recruited from all over the city to assist with making this local, neighborhood-scale vision a reality.

An online system takes care of all logistical operations involved in setting up a city-wide tree growing initiative involving hundreds if not thousands of people per city. Our system makes it possible for everyone to participate: from young schoolgoers to retired people with limited mobility, and from professional botanists to volunteers who have never grown a tree in their life. Depending on one's available time, space, and energy, a user can contribute anything from harvesting some seeds one afternoon to growing 100 seedlings in one's garden for a period of two years. Help in any shape and size is welcome, useful, and contributes to the greater scheme.

To participate in Communitree, city residents sign up to our website and indicate their availability by either picking a particular activity, a particular time in the year they want to help, or a particular area of the city they want to focus on. Our system will then tell them exactly how, when, and where they can best contribute. We split up our projects in six phases which all need volunteers:

1. Planning
2. Seed harvest
3. Germination
4. Sapling growth
5. Planting
6. Monitoring

A single user can decide to focus on caring for a small batch of trees from start to finish (planting the seeds, growing saplings, and later planting and monitoring the adult trees), but people can also take care (repetitively, if they want) of one particular step and specializing in doing just that specific part of the process (e.g. growing saplings from seed). Through our platform, users can simply indicate their preferences and the system guides them through the process and connects them with others, wherever applicable.