Join us on Nov. 10th!

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We're excited to be a part of Green Living Project's "Global Sustainability: Central America" video series. The DC screening is happening November 10th at 7pm at Eastern Market - hope to see you there.
 
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**Special DC Premiere**
 
"Global Sustainability: Central America", Presented by Amazon Conservation Association
Featuring Special Guest Speaker Jonathan B. Tourtellot, National Geographic Fellow and Geotourism Editor, National Geographic Traveler
 
Please join Green Living Project for its newest multi-media event showcasing cutting-edge global sustainability stories!
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Nuts n' Bolts of the Business

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Our Snapshot 2015 series provides a rough sketch of Planting Empowerment five years down the road - from operations to products to impacts. In this part, we describe how the Planting Empowerment business structure looks.

Planting Empowerment in 2015 will be a self sustaining, fast-growing business with approximately 1000 hectares under cultivation, and approaching $6,000,000 of investment raised for the plantations. The business will restructure to become either an L3C or a B-corporation.

An L3C is a new type of corporation whose principal activity is social or environmental improvement, is limited-profitability, and is more "tax-attractive" to institutional investors such as endowments and trusts. With an eye on attaining scale, we are considering this option in order to tap into the social/environmental carve-outs of some of these investors.

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Update from Panama

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Operations Director Damion Croston visited Panama in early May. Here he presents a couple of the more important items from the trip.

Small Fire in Plantation

In April we experienced a small fire in one of our plantations in Nuevo Paraiso. A local partner from whom we lease land was clearing an adjacent parcel to plant crops when the fire made its way past the fire break onto our plantation. Thanks to the vigilance and quick actions of worker Jose Rodriguez damage was kept to a minimum. An investigation is currently being conducted to assess total loss and to find ways to prevent another such incident. Sponsors can rest assured that the fire will not affect the value of their holdings, and PE assumes ownership of total losses associated with the incident.

UNDP Project

Last Fall we helped our local partners in Arimae obtain funding from the UNDP-GEF Small Grants Programme to conduct an economically and environmentally beneficial forestry project. We have continued to facilitate the project by providing technical assistance. The community has made significant progress since last year and will plant some of the products from the nursery they built as part of the project next month. In the future the nursery will be used to plant native species saplings which will be sold to Planting Empowerment for use in our own plantations. We will continue to provide our local community partners with assistance and economic opportunities whenever possible.

Snapshot 2015

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We started Planting Empowerment because we recognized an opportunity for rainforest communities to profit sustainably from their natural resources. The business model was formed around some basic tenets:

  • To slow deforestation, forest dwellers need an incentive not to deforest
  • Land tenure is paramount in addressing deforestation
  • Rainforest dwellers can earn more from their undervalued parcels of land through sustainable forestry
  • Forestry projects would be funded by environmentally and socially-minded investors

Since Planting Empowerment formed in late 2006, we have signed four land-lease partnerships with local Panamanians, planted 22,000 trees over 50 acres and raised $140,000 in forest investments from over 100 investors to finance these operations.

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