TreeSisters invites everyone to be in a relationship of radical generosity with the Earth and to assume leadership in ways that inspire others to do the same.
Here in our feature “Grateful Changemakers”, we celebrate programs and projects that serve as beacons of gratefulness. These efforts elevate the values of grateful living and illuminate their potential to transform both individuals and communities. Join us in appreciating the inspiring and catalyzing contribution these Changemakers offer to shaping a more grateful world.
TreeSisters
A project participant in India holds a young tree. Image: We Forest
TreeSisters envisions a world in which it is normal for everyone to protect and restore themselves and their world. The non-profit’s global network of women funds the acceleration of tropical reforestation as an expression of collective planetary care, and in doing so elicits shared responsibility for restoration at the grassroots level. As of September 2019, TreeSisters has funded over six million trees across its projects in Kenya, Madagascar, Brazil, Cameroon, Nepal, and India.
Empowering women to step into their feminine Nature-based leadership, TreeSisters supports humanity’s identity shift from a consumer species to a restorer species. The organization’s approach focuses on the creation of resources and experiences that balance inner and outer, spiritual and practical, and behavioral and ecological pathways towards that shift. Founder Clare Dubois shares more about how TreeSisters engages, nourishes, inspires, and activates women through their unique gifts and generosity for the benefit of themselves, each other, and the forests that we love and need.
What sparked the founding/creation of TreeSisters?
TreeSisters arose out of a search for something that made social sense in relation to climate change. Having distilled a grassroots reforestation strategy being rolled out in Southern India, I was off to a meeting where I intended to convince a communications group to adopt my concept of a people-led reforestation revolution. Instead of that, my car skidded on black ice and was prevented from going over an edge by a tree (a great metaphor for humanity!) and at the point of impact, a voice started talking to me inside the car. Word for word it gave me the operating instructions, mission, and name of TreeSisters, stating that we needed to reforest the tropics within 10 years and that women were the missing piece.
Collage of faces from the TreeSisters team. Founder & CEO, Clare Dubois, far left.
How does TreeSisters fill a need for the world?
TreeSisters fulfills a need in women to do something meaningful in the face of climate change, ecosystem collapse, and massive deforestation, within a global support system of other women who care. It also addresses the profound lack of true feminine leadership in this world. We have a unique dual mission, which addresses inner and outer change as well as restoration, because everyone wants to make a difference and be a part of the solution.
We provide community: a powerfully supportive and inclusive culture of acceptance and love, tools, courses, global online full and new moon gatherings, and Nature-based content that draws women more deeply into their “wild nature” to experience their own leadership and power. Becoming a treesister is the start of a journey of togetherness that takes many from apathy into activism, unleashing creativity and outrageousness along the way!
One of the core choices of a treesister is to donate monthly towards tropical reforestation as a way to embed reciprocity with Nature into her life. Forest loss is an ongoing insanity in a world warming through carbon excess, so TreeSisters educates about the vital role of trees and channels grassroots funding to its planting projects across Madagascar, Brazil, Cameroon, Nepal, India, and Kenya. Forest restoration is one of our world’s greatest needs. TreeSisters is currently planting over two million trees a year. Our world needs to plant over a trillion trees — fast.
How do you see TreeSisters as embodying/being related to grateful living?
Our planet is constantly providing for all of us, yet we take and take without consideration for what we are doing. TreeSisters exists to normalize reciprocity with the Earth, making it as normal to give back to Her as it currently is to take Her for granted. Through our daily actions, through the choices we make, by taking time to come into connection with everything around us, we realize that everything is connected. When we take time to acknowledge these things, we can see how fortunate we are to have them, and that instills gratitude into our daily lives and all our thoughts.
Participants in a project in Nepal. Image: Eden Reforestation Projects.
How does TreeSisters inspire gratefulness and related actions (love, kindness, compassion, etc.)?
A treesister makes five intentional choices rooted in gratitude for the mystery, for each other, for Nature, and for the privilege of being able to serve life. This is grateful living. These choices are listed in detail at: https://treesisters.org/grow-yourself. At the heart of these choices is the promise to act with an open mind and heart, to see the good in one another, and to act in ways that encourage each other and allow us to give our gifts. The TreeSisters’ culture is one of inclusivity, rooted in deep acceptance, kindness, and compassion to enable a shared field of safety, healing, emergence, and discovery.
What inspires people to support TreeSisters, as supporters and partners?
There is an increasing recognition and desire to start doing something regenerative for the planet, and more and more people are resonating with our culture and mission of normalizing reciprocity and giving back. Our public presence is one of positivity, beauty, hope, and inclusivity in a world suffering increased fear, divisiveness, and suffering. Our ethos is rooted in radical generosity, love, and care. We model experimentation and having a go without need for perfection — experimentation because there is no such thing as failure. We are accessible, positive, and audacious, and the invitation to lead, to play big, and to rise to the occasion finally seems to be landing….
Project participants in Kenya. Image: International Tree Foundation
What is the lasting impact of TreeSisters’ work?
Our global network of women have shared that the support they’ve received has catalyzed their gifts and leadership into the world. Being a treesister is a powerful invitation, and participating in the choices, campaigns, calls, and opportunities arising throughout the global network is often fed back to us as being life-changing.
In the tropics, we see landscapes and lives transformed. The projects that our global network supports include diverse impacts: cloud forest and mangrove corridor cultivation, water table and soil restoration, endangered species protection, fish stock replenishment, empowering women to take the lead in masculine-driven cultures, and touching the lives of some of our world’s poorest communities while sequestering the excess carbon that is warming our world. Currently, our reforestation programs positively impact over 16,000 people.
What are some of the common barriers and obstacles that arise in your work? How are they addressed?
There is much fear within and between many women that blocks belief in one’s self and one’s capacity for action. We address this by creating space for truth-speaking, vulnerability, and rawness in our culture of sistering and acceptance (love being the crucial ingredient to melting fear). There is also a misunderstanding that supporting women is a rejection of men, which isn’t the case — it’s an acknowledgment that generations of social and physical repressions have hindered a balance of feminine leadership in our world. We address this barrier by welcoming men in as many ways as they wish to step in, while holding women-only spaces and courses that directly address the realities of being a woman in an inherited patriarchal culture that has taught us to avoid our true embodied natural power and intelligence.
Participants in a project in India. Image: Project Greenhands
What inspires you and everyone working for the project about this work? What inspires you to continue growing this project?
TreeSisters’ culture, organization, and mission are designed to support everyone’s ongoing growth. It’s deeply personal and highly relevant to the most crucial issues of our time. As the forests burn and fear rises, the choice to continue bringing all your creativity to something that builds hope and comfort, that believes in everyone and calls for their greatness, and that provides directly relevant and impactful solutions in the face of climate change is such a relief. What else would any of us be doing?
How does gratefulness inspire you to make change in the world?
I love this natural world more than I have the capacity to express in words. She is my everything. She is all of our everything. My gratitude to Her is expressed in the giving of my life in complete service to Her regeneration and to humanity’s awakening into gratitude for Her.
How does TreeSisters plan to grow?
We plan to grow through the love of women all around the world who are waking up to the need to bring their gifts to the table and transform the system. We see trees embedded into every festival, sporting event, music concert, every gathering, every purchase, in every way that we take from our world, so that eventually we cannot consume without actively restoring in the same transaction.
Trees ready for planting in Brazil. Image: We Forest
If you could encapsulate one message for people who support and partner with TreeSisters, what would that be?
TreeSisters invites everyone to be in a relationship of radical generosity with the Earth and to assume leadership in ways that inspire others to do the same.
If TreeSisters could share one message about living gratefully with the world, what would it be?
Everything that we have in our lives (from our families and friends to the food we eat to the tools we use to the homes we live in, etc.) comes from the Earth — absolutely everything. And yet, we so easily forget that the Earth provides for us at every level of being. Developing a daily practice of gratitude towards the incredible living system that is our planet can deepen your relationship with Nature, your sense of belonging, and your connection to your own deeper Nature. And if you’d like to give back to Earth in more tangible ways, we’d love you to help re-robe our stunning planet in green, by making funding trees in the tropics literally part of the air that you breathe.
To learn more about the inspiring work of TreeSisters, visit the website: TreeSisters
To learn about other Grateful Changemakers, visit: Grateful Changemakers
Do you know of a project/program that elevates the values of grateful living? If so, we invite you to nominate them for our Grateful Changemaker article series.
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