Editorial: Tending the urban forest for 30 years

New chapter for a valuable venture called Tree Trust.

Last update: November 27, 2006 - 1:20 PM

In 1976, two civic-minded Minneapolis residents met for a drink to discuss the epidemic of Dutch elm disease that was ravaging their city. G. Rolf Svendsen, then a member of the Park Board, and Donald Willeke, chairman of the State Shade Tree Advisory Committee, agreed that the Twin Cities faced a shortage of mature trees and, because of a weak national economy, a surplus of unemployed teenagers.

They had scarcely described the problem before a solution presented itself: Raise money to buy seedlings and hire teenagers, then turn a corps of young urban foresters loose on the city.

Svendsen and Willeke called the venture Tree Trust and, three decades later, the numbers tell what a fine idea it was. Tree Trust has furnished training and summer jobs to perhaps 30,000 disadvantaged young people; planted more than 20,000 trees across the metropolitan area; built retaining walls, planting boxes, timber staircases and other landscape projects in city parks from Elmo Lake to Eden Prairie, and grown into a $3.6 million nonprofit enterprise.

Virtue, however, isn't always its own reward. Tree Trust has relied on federal and state employment grants for much of its budget over the years, but both streams are dwindling because of budget cuts in Washington and St. Paul. This year Tree Trust began a $6 million capital campaign to make itself more self-sufficient. The money would pay for a central headquarters, launch new lines of revenue-producing landscape business and begin building an endowment to pay youth salaries.

A nonprofit that has done so much to beautify the Twin Cities deserves a community that returns the favor. More information is available at treetrust.org.

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