Plant Five for Life: A Gift for Every Pittsburgh Newborn

Plant Five for Life has a mission to connect children and families with nature from birth. Our core program gifts five trees to every child born in area hospitals and matches them to sites in need of ecological and social services near their home.

Starting in April, we piloted this vision by planting 5,000 trees as a gift to 1,000 children born at Magee-Womens Hospital. The trees are restoring a former coal mine site to forest at Pittsburgh Botanic Garden. Families joined a planting celebration in October and had the opportunity to meet parents in their community with children the same age.

Following our successful planting and engagement efforts in the fall was a series of events and plantings in the spring. In April we planted trees with Winchester Thurston elementary schoolchildren and their families in Frick Park. On May 4th, we co-hosted the creation of the largest urban orchard in the country, planting over 200 trees at the Hilltop Urban Farm in partnership with the Farm and the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation. Our community engagement events included two storybook readings at Patagonia Pittsburgh, a book reading and tree giveaway with Chicka Chicka Boom Boom co-author John Archambault,  as well as an informational event in collaboration with Green Mountain Energy.

More community events are in the works for the summer, and tree planting at new sites will recommence with the fall planting season.

With your contribution, we can better expand our reach to a variety of sites and neighborhoods throughout the city and county, and give this gift of life to all children born all year round. We are raising funds from a variety of sources, but contributions from individuals are a meaningful show of support while we continue to work with foundations and grant-makers and develop our model to sustain a gift of trees to children long into the future. 

With additional donations in hand, we will extend the gift to more of the newly arrived children and their parents of our community and arrange for planting on publicly accessible sites already identfied and secured throughout the city and county.

Family Day celebrations will be held in the planting season after birth and are designed, in part, to connect parents with children of the same age in their community to one another and to resources in their community. 

We more funding, we plant to expand our tree giveaway efforts to address canopy loss on private property, as well as expanding the scale of our core program of planting on sites in need of ecological and social services.

Environmental opportunity is often a matter of access and education, connection and engagement. A gift at birth cuts across all vulnerabilites. We believe that a child and a community of trees can grow alongside one another and teach about life, nurture and care. 

Committing to planting for all the children of Pittsburgh can help the city meet its own goals of planting 780,000 trees by 2030 to help mitigate rising CO2 levels and buffer climate change impacts. As nearly 13,000 children are born each year in the city, giving 5 trees per child results in 65,000 trees a year. 65,000 trees per year equals 780,000 trees by 2030 if we begin this year. Your contribution helps us monitor already planted trees and scale up to our ambitious goal!