A foundation for children that ignores the world those children will inherit has misread its own mandate. Climate, soil, water and shade are children's issues on a thirty-year delay. So the Foundation keeps a second ledger beside the financial one, written in trees.
A grove for every mandate
The rule is simple and has no exceptions: when a benefactor entrusts capital to the Endowment, the Foundation plants a grove. Not as marketing, and not as an offset bought by the tonne, but as planting done with established reforestation partners who choose native species, involve local communities and tend what they plant. A tree that is planted and abandoned is a photograph; a tree that is tended for five years is a forest.
We favour projects where the grove works twice: agroforestry that shades a school and feeds it, watershed planting that protects the valley a clinic sits in, mangroves that guard the coastline a fishing village's children grow up on. The science on this is mature and the practitioner community is excellent. Our job is to be their patient balance sheet.
A living ledger
In time, this page of the Journal will carry the register itself: where the groves stand, what was planted, and how it fares. A portfolio statement that rustles. We can think of no better way for a fortune to introduce itself to the future.
Published by CNOTA Foundation
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