Trees for Life is a nonprofit organization based in Wichita, Kansas and working throughout the world to help end world hunger and poverty. They do this by planting fruit and fuel trees, providing fuel-efficient cooking devices, supporting libraries, donating books, providing educational materials and much more. Trees for Life was started by Balbir Mathur, a naturalized American who was born in India. After coming to the US for college, Mathur settled here and adopted a Western lifestyle. But after running a successful business for years, he decided that he wanted to do something more with his life than help the rich get richer while the poor got poorer. So he quit his job and set about finding a way to help others. After much research, he determined that planting fruit and fuel trees would be a good way to tackle the problem of world hunger, as well as the environmental damage caused by deforestation. The trees would provide food for people and animals, as well as protect the soils that subsistence farmers need to survive.
His first attempt failed; all the trees died. Undeterred, he kept working. Eventually, he developed a successful model that empowered the local people to become leaders of the movement, rather than just recipients of a hand-out. Each person who received a tree vowed to pass the gift along to two other people and share their knowledge. The movement grew.
But Mathur also realized that impoverished people need so much more than trees. So Trees for Life started providing fuel-efficient cook stoves, books for learning, money for libraries and many other efforts. They also started a collaborative scientific journal,
Trees for Life Journal, which allows people from around the world to share traditional knowledge and scientific studies about beneficial trees and plants.
Today, you can still
plant trees in India by donating to Trees for Life, or you can help them fund other projects throughout the world in countries like Malawi, El Salvador, Guatemala and Ethiopia.
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