Friends of Trees celebrates 1 million trees planted, despite furloughs

It was a festive day at Friends of Trees. A crowd celebrated the planting of the one millionth tree in the urban canopies of the Willamette Valley with music, food and old friends. But behind the scenes, a shadow loomed.

Friends of Trees aims to create a shady environment in neighborhoods where the temperature can be up to 20 degrees higher than on leafy tree-lined streets. Choosing trees that will survive rising temperatures in urban areas is crucial.

With a $12 million Urban and Community Forestry grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2023, Friends of Trees is leading a coalition of 11 organizations, called Building Resilience Across Northwest Communities and Habitats, or BRANCH. The coalition brings resources to low-income communities disproportionately impacted by pollution and climate change.

It’s just the sort of project the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency has said it wants to cut.

Yashar Vasef, the executive director of Friends of Trees in Portland, has already felt the chill of funding losses — and had to temporarily lay off two workers.

“Our coalition grant is under threat of termination from the new federal administration,” Vasef said. “We have already lost another awarded federal grant from the same funding stream.”

The U.S. Forest Service canceled a second $400,000 grant early this year. And in March, the federal government canceled a Multnomah County grant for $80,000 through the Environmental Protection Agency. The grant was intended to support three years of planting in Gresham, but it was terminated near the end of the first season.

“Due to the uncertainty of the coalition grant and other federal funding and with the backdrop of what was already a challenging funding environment going back to last year, we had to make the painful decision to furlough two staff members that were brought on specifically for the coalition grant,” Vasef said.

Still, BRANCH coalition members say they will work together to cautiously move forward. And the community showed up in full force April 27 to celebrate 35 years of tree and shrub planting in urban and natural areas.   

After a spirited vote on which species would be the one millionth tree planted, Friends of Trees chose the silverleaf oak, which lives in hot, dry conditions in Mexico. Among its superpowers: it loves dry soil and its fuzzy leaves capture pollution particulates. It can also intercept rain, grow quickly and provide shade.

Impact of climate change on trees

Friends of Trees serves Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties. Their service area extends south to Lane County, with a chapter in Eugene. They also plant trees in Clark County, Washington.

Anyone in those areas can sign up through their website and browse the list of trees. Then, teams of volunteers hold neighborhood planting events.

Vasef relies on staff arborists and experts with climate data to inform decisions about tree planting.

“Studies have shown that trees can lower urban temperatures as much as 10 degrees,” Vasef said. “During a heat wave, that can be lifesaving. Extreme heat is becoming more common, even expected, during summers in the Pacific Northwest.”

Vivek Shandas, a professor of geography at Portland State University with a research focus on urban environmental quality, has looked closely at the effects of climate change.

In 2012, Shandas launched a study to track the temperature in places with different numbers of trees. A team of graduate students found that temperatures varied by as much as 15 degrees throughout Portland. During the 2021 heat dome, their measurements showed leafy Northwest Portland averaged 99 degrees, while the Lents neighborhood in Southeast Portland, which has fewer trees, was as hot as 124 degrees.

“Heat kills more people than any other natural hazard, more than hurricanes and cyclones and earthquakes,” Shandas said. “Heat is a silent killer that very discriminatingly kills low-income populations. It is insidious. Heat gets into your house or apartment and affects your heart and lungs and blood.”

In southern Oregon, a certified arborist predicts which trees will be best to add to the canopy further north. The Willamette Valley of the future could include more hardwood trees like madrone and various types of oak that better withstand rising temperatures. Blue oak, a drought-tolerant species from California, could prove critical to Oregon’s changing landscape because it hybridizes well with oaks from Oregon.

“Southern Oregon makes a great proving ground for trees that can also thrive in the Willamette Valley,” said Mike Oxendine, executive director of the nonprofit Oregon Urban Rural and Community Forestry in Talent, Oregon and winner of Oregon Heritage Tree Commission’s Tree Hero Award in 2023.

“We are looking 300 miles south to Redding, California and Northern California areas to see what is doing well there, what’s surviving and thriving there,” Oxendine said. “That’s probably what southern Oregon’s climate will be like 10 to 20 years from now. Hotter and drier with more intense winter weather. Then Portland and the Willamette Valley to Eugene will be like southern Oregon, with 115 degree summers and long, extended periods of drought.”

Oxendine believes in the longevity of native Oregon trees as temperatures heat up quickly in the next 20 years.

“I can plant a Douglas fir here at someone’s house and feel perfectly good that it’s a resilient climate friendly choice,” Oxendine said.

Serving communities with local solidarity

BRANCH has been busy strengthening communities and green spaces.

“We alone can’t do it,” Vasef said. “We need all hands on deck with other nonprofits, city and human power.”

The 11 organizations that make up BRANCH are reimbursed quarterly through the $12 million federal grant. Several are proactively working to preempt the possibility of losing those funds. The organizations vary in capacity and outside funding sources, making some more vulnerable to cuts.

The City of Gresham and the City of Portland are part of BRANCH. These two agencies have come together for culturally specific outreach. Through partnership and grants, they build community engagement and plant trees.

When the Trump administration cut the Justice 40 Initiative, it removed from the internet the map the agencies use to locate underserved areas.

The organizations involved all bring different resources to the coalition’s shared goals. Depave and Wisdom of the Elders contribute expertise on green spaces and stewardship. Black Parent Initiative and Verde are committed to building a healthy outdoor environment to improve air quality and overall well-being, along with connecting people with natural areas. Connecting Canopies is an initiative partnering with The Blueprint Foundation to create equitable urban tree canopy.

Leigh Rappaport, winner of the 2024 Henrietta Award for Environmental Leadership and Achievement from the Columbia Slough Watershed Council, is the natural resource pathway manager for Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center. The organization provides leadership opportunities for youth at POIC-Rosemary Anderson HIgh School, an alternative school providing community education and workforce training for at-risk youth.   

For 17 years, Rappaport has trained young people to be crew leaders. Students join with Portland Parks and Recreation, Friends of Trees and the Columbia Slough Water Council to see first-hand the ecosystems and intricacies of animal and plant life on the Columbia Slough. Trained crew leaders then lead groups of volunteers on restoration projects, with help from Friends of Trees.

“Any time I can get young people outdoors, it’s super exciting,” Rappaport said. “We help plant 4,000 trees and shrubs every year with crew leaders and their groups. They’re making an impact on their community, learning about climate change and how they can help. We’re talking about young people who have been disenfranchised and they work with programs they never knew existed, learning about the natural world and the communities in their cities.”

Rappaport enjoys working with groups in BRANCH and seeing the impact of people coming together to accomplish more.

“I think when these relationships are built and nurtured, there’s room for collaboration,” Rappaport said.

Rappaport also works on workforce development with Caitlin Costello at Columbia Slough Watershed Council, which has three major programs: education, events and stewardship. Costello is the council’s stewardship director. The first in her family to graduate college, she attended Portland State University as part of the Ronald E. McNair Scholars federal program for marginalized students, earning her degree in Environmental Science a few years ago.

Through the coalition, Costello works on projects in the northeast end of Portland’s Columbia Slough, which covers more than 20 miles of channels to the Willamette River, encompassing more than 32,700 acres of land in East Multnomah County and Portland.

Youth from the Reynolds School District explore the slough and plant native species at local parks with Costello and the program’s education director. Other organizations join planting on Stewardship Saturdays and eradicate invasive plants like ivy and Himalayan blackberries.

Costello wanted to see more Spanish-speaking stewardship on Saturdays and through the BRANCH coalition, she has achieved that.

“I found out Verde has a group of crew leaders paid to run Spanish-speaking stewardship events, so we are starting that program together now,” Costello said.

The BRANCH coalition meets quarterly and groups meet informally as well. This communication empowers organizations to work together on common goals. Some have been able to streamline their efforts through collaboration.

“There are a lot of organizations in the coalition that bring various perspectives from the Latino community and groups that should be guiding processes in the Slough anyway so we can partner better,” Costello said.

Latino residents are coping with noise pollution and air quality concerns because of industrialization along the Slough.

“I think the coalition is a really great way to finally get into a space where a bunch of people want the same outcomes, are finding a shared language and are finding a process that works so we can help each other out rather than do the same thing separately at the same time,” Costello said.

Costello hopes to help communities engage with green spaces where they live. For example, if families with no air conditioning in their homes know where to swim, they would have some relief from future potential heat domes.

Moving forward

Federal funding is precarious, but Costello remains relatively optimistic.

“I’m already working with my development manager to try to get other grants ongoing that will support these programs anyway and will help support by paying parts of the other organizations to partner with us on these projects,” Costello said. “My hope and goal is to support them and to support us either way.”

Other groups who met through the coalition say they will continue working together, with or without federal funding. Leigh Bohannon, the community outreach and resource manager of the Black Parent Initiative, believes that serving the Black community with groups like the Blueprint Foundation will continue beyond the project.

“It’s important that we encompass and learn all the things that are impacted by this project,” Bohannon said. “It’s not just looking nice and having pretty streets. There are actual psychological, mental, physical things that are improved by doing this work. It’s so much deeper than the aesthetic and there are organizations that help you maintain the trees. It’s going to benefit generations beyond ours.”

In February, a cautionary tale unfolded in southern Oregon when Oxendine’s nonprofit, Oregon Urban Rural and Community Forestry, received bad news. The Trump administration cut their $600,000 grant from the Arbor Day Foundation.

“This will impact future plans big time,” Oxendine said. “We had just gotten geared up for a huge amount of work and the funding was gone. It was disappointing for sure. For our organization we’d rather focus not on how it impacts us but how it impacts the people we were going to serve with the funding. What we learned through this process is there are way more people out there who need these services than we could ever service, particularly with this amount of funding.”

Oregon Urban Rural and Community Forestry plans to make good on their promises even if the government didn’t make good on theirs. With help from the Oregon Department of Forestry, they will finish up work they had in the books.

“We thought if there was somebody we could trust to go into business with, it would be the federal government but that is definitely not the case,” Oxendine said. “They pulled out the rug from underneath us without even giving a warning. One day we had funding and the next day we didn’t.”

Oxendine is hopeful that Friends of Trees will be able to continue its work contributing to the equitability of neighborhoods with community engagement and volunteers.

“Nobody does it better than Friends of Trees,” Oxendine said. “They have a team of people that are just amazing and they have figured it out. They know community tree planting. We model a lot of what we do off of what Friends of Trees has done. We’re so blessed to have them, especially in Portland.”

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This article appears in May 7, 2025.