Haiti Tree Project

Karen Nicolas, international relief worker, mother, reforester, and director/co-founder of The Haiti Tree Project. After years of working in emergency relief, Karen and her husband launched the nonprofit to provide support to Haitian communities in the wake of natural and man-made devastation to the native tree population. The Haiti Tree Project focuses on reforestation to help the people of Haiti live healthier, more sustainable lives. Hear her story. TheHaitiTreeProject.org
 

AD: Learn CryptoBot Investing Techniques
See our private video lessons, join our mastermind and see how our bots profit in bull/bear markets.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Triple Bottom Line | Episode 21 | Haiti Tree Project |

[Upbeat theme music plays] 

Female Voice Over 
[00:01] Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach, and here’s your host, Taylor Martin.

Taylor Martin 
[00:17] Hello, and welcome, everybody. I have an interesting podcast for today about The Haiti Tree Project. Karen Nicolas reached out to me and told me a little bit about her story and how she started this project in Haiti. And I thought it was a great story, and I want to – I wanted to share that with you, mainly because there’s a lot of corporate donors, corporate partners out there looking for a nonprofit to dig themselves into and to really help and make a huge impact. This is one of those organizations, so for any of those companies out there that are listening that have One Percent for the Planet or they have some sort of give back or sustainability initiative for their ESG, listen up. I think this is a great organization for you to get involved with because everything they do just is quite impressive. So Karen, tell our listeners about yourself, your background, and how you started to work with The Haiti Tree Project. 

Karen Nicolas 
[01:11] Hi, everybody. Yeah, my name’s Karen Nicolas. I am an avid tree planter in Haiti because there is such a great need for everyone there to have food security, and one of the big things that has driven me since I first went there in the year 2000 was the fact that everyone’s going there doing small jobs to satisfy one part of people’s basic needs. But when I go and I look at Haiti, I see a situation where people need their country back. People need a place where they can find their own need; they can meet their own basic needs. They can meet everything if they just have their environment back. 

Since the beginning of time, when Haiti first started their country, they started with a country that was a lot – it was very much deforested from sugar cane plantations, and when I went there in 2004 after a hurricane, Hurricane Jeanne in 2004, there was flooding in Gonaives that lasted six months. There was deforestation over the entire region, and people were experiencing drought. People were experiencing starvation. People were coming to us for every single thing that they could possibly need, and we didn’t have our funding yet. We were actually living together with them for at least six months before we had a large funding coming from Corporations Canada and USAID, and at that point, we started doing water filtration. That was my project was teaching people how to use sand to build water filters. We did it in individual homes for a few years. 

But at the same time, our group was doing schools. Our group was doing – we were doing food in the schools. We were doing building schools. We were doing water canals. We were doing small nurseries, many different kinds of basic needs, meeting with – we were trying to meet all the basic needs of the people in a town that had no natural resources anymore. They didn’t have any more trees. It was desertified area. There was a water spring that’s – it was a hot water spring where I lived at the time, and I realized that – over those years, I realized, wow, if they just had their trees, they could have everything they need. 

And then I fell in love, and my husband and I went to the south where he was from. And he told me that, when he was a boy, he lived in a forest, a jungle where he could grab a bird for lunch, grab a mango for a snack, grab cashews, grab any kind of natural fruit, indigenous fruits that you can imagine that come out of the tropics. They were all there around his home, and today, everyone there is living directly in the sun. They’re just out in the open scavenging for things from the market, trying to make ends meet. Most people have left for the city. It’s a tragedy, but the soil is still there. And many people have figured out ways to bring the trees up around their homes. But the overall devastation is still there, and it’s horrific. I can go on and on about what you see when you go to Haiti. 

Taylor Martin
[04:27] I’ve seen some tree planting projects like in Africa where they basic go out and find either existing farmers or people to farm a parcel of land, and they’ll educate them on, okay, this is how we’re going to plant the trees to hold soil erosion and then to protect a barrier from animals that might come in because they’re going to end up farming the land. But the trees are the number one component. They had to do all that before they can even get into the planting of plants for food and things like this. For Haiti, it sounds like it’s that and much more because you don’t have a canopy above you. You’re just living out in the sun. 

Karen Nicolas
[05:08] That’s right. A lot of the – the mountains around all of the villages have been completely cleared because the trees – you can get $300 for a tree. That was 10 years ago. Now you can get $500 for a single tree, so yeah, the trees that are still there are being cut. But the mountains, it looks like grass. And there’s still enough soil to grow trees, but people just – they’re surviving daily. They don’t have the time and the energy to do community projects, the education to do community projects to go rebuild that soil and to do the terracing you’re talking about. They need outsiders. 

So yes, The Haiti Tree Project, we’ve been running education in churches and then giving out trees, mostly teaching people how to dig the right hole, the right size hole, because a lot of times they’ll dig it just as big as the bag and then just stick it in. But we’re teaching them you must build it two feet by two feet, put the – mix the soil with the manure, and then put the soil on top, and then put – and then grab any kind of vegetation and put it around it for mulch. And we require that. For every tree, we require all those supplies ready before we deliver a tree, and then we require that people come and listen before they get a tree as to how that tree’s going to grow, where to put it, how far apart, all of these things. And then we let them go plant it where they may because we don’t have the funding to go right now and do large projects of terracing or bringing water up the mountain. You know how much it costs for people to take water up the side of a mountain? And then it doesn’t rain the next day and the day after that or the day after that. 

Taylor Martin
[06:49] And then when it does rain, it pours for days on end or something like that and washes away all the topsoil. 

Karen Nicolas
[06:55] Yeah. Yeah. That’s predictable because of the rainy season. But yeah, in the dry season, you know it’s not going to rain, and the rainy season, you know it’s going to rain too much so yeah. With the amount of funding we’ve been having, the steady, small amounts of funding, we’re able to educate and give out trees, and we’re able to stop people before taking a tree home and making sure they’ve prepared for that tree before they take it home. And that’s not something we’ve always did. We’ve learned that from experience. Over the last 10 years, we’ve learned, if you give people 10 trees, 90% survival. If you give people 500 trees, you still get about – you get about 50% or less survival because people just can’t take care of that many trees. They need a lot of attention over the years, over the first year especially. 

So the cost of growing a tree, I mean, you can spend 30 cents on a tree in the nursery, and it’s ready to go to the ground in 3 months or 6 months, depending on the tree. But then when you take it in the truck, that’s another 30 cents because the gasoline is $15 a gallon sometimes in Haiti right now. You get it to the mountain, and then they have – you have to pay people to unload those trees and take them to the land that we’ve decided as the best land for those trees. Right now, we have lots and lots of cacao trees. Everyone loves them, but they must have shade. So we have to find a piece of land where people have let some shrubs grow, some small trees grow. And we found this old man named [08:27] this month that is so happy to have a legacy, and he’s like, “Please, come take my land. You can have it. I’ll just grow some corn here and there. Come take my beautiful land that I’ve let go, that I can’t manage.” 

And so we’re sending people in, 15 cents to dig the hole and then plant it and put water for the first time. Then we’re paying people $80 a month to take care of those trees, and hopefully, those trees will survive. They know they have to come back and replace any that died. We’ve staked them. We put colored, colorful stakes next to them so they can’t lose them. And that’s what it takes just to keep maybe 90% alive over the next couple years. And that right there is already – for six months, it’s probably $3 a tree. And then, to get it to the next year, it’s another $3 because a whole year of support for those trees is necessary to keep them weeded, to keep them growing straight, all these things. 

Taylor Martin 
[09:30] And that kind of trees are we talking about here? 

Karen Nicolas
[09:33] Right now in our nursery we have cacao because that’s the seed that…

Taylor Martin 
[09:37] My favorite. 

Karen Nicolas
[09:38] That’s the seed that was coming on the trees two months ago ripe. The Sed tree is an indigenous tree that’s – that just dropped its seed, so they’ll be ready in October. The breadfruit tree is something you can grow from the root, so we’re growing that year round, and breadfruit’s really unique. Because if a pregnant woman it’s just breadfruit her whole pregnancy, she’ll be fine. Her baby will be fine. It’s got every nutritional element that you need to survive, so breadfruit is a big one that we’re getting funding for alone. So we’re doing lots of breadfruit. We have 25 species of just fruit trees that we grow year round. 

Taylor Martin 
[10:18] Oh, wow!

Karen Nicolas
[10:19] So it’s avocados, mangos, a lot of cashews. They grow really well in the sun. We have [10:26]. Kenep is a little fruit with a big seed. We’ve got a breadnut that looks just like breadfruit that’s got a big seed in it that they boil on the street. Yeah, and there’s many, guava, corossol. There’s lots, 25 species of fruit trees. There’s five or so indigenous trees that we mix up with the fruit trees so that we’re asking people, okay, you plant a fruit tree, but you also need to plant something to hold the earth, something to give you water. I haven’t mentioned it yet, but water is one of the huge, huge problems. 
 
Taylor Martin 
[11:02] Yeah. I can only imagine. 

Karen Nicolas
[11:04] They have to walk eight hours a day, eight hours a day with a bucket on their head to get to – get water, and so how often are they able to bathe, much less get clean water? People really struggle for water in many, many areas. Of course, people are concentrated around springs a lot of times, but a lot of times they still live in the area where there used to be springs. Because in Haiti, the culture is such that you stay where you were born and you stay where your family was born, and you don’t really move into another area. You’re not really welcome, so a lot of people are walking hours to get water every day. And then a lot of people are drinking out of the river because the springs from their village are gone. And of course, that’s because of the lack of trees on the mountains and the lack of filtering down in. So The Haiti Tree Project has always focused on mountainous villages to try to help with that water flow, but it costs a lot to get those trees up a mountain. And if I was going to have a partnership of some kind, that would be the first thing I would do is to pay that 10 times more money per tree to build a project that would trickle water into all the trees on the mountainside. 

Taylor Martin
[12:19] How is it in terms of the over – it sounds dire, right? How massive of a project are we talking about here? Are you nipping away at it, or is it just – does it seem insurmountable? 

Karen Nicolas
[12:32] These days, I feel like the reforestation market globally is so big that if we could channel money into good project that we could easily reforest. The way to go is to monitor the trees and pay the farmers over time, not just focus money on tree plantings. The biggest problem in the reforestation market is that everyone’s donating to plant a tree and when everyone should be donating to grow a tree. Everyone should be directly paying that farmer to grow the tree as a green job. It doesn’t make sense for all the – all these intermediary companies around the world to get $3 while the person – my organization gets 10 cents. Someone donates $3.10. I get 10 cents. They get $3, and the farmer gets nothing. He just receives a tree, and he’s supposed to have the time to go and take care of it. It’s true with 1 tree, 10 trees, but if you want to scale, if you want to blanket their land, they can’t do it themselves. They need the finances to pay someone to do it or to pay themselves so they don’t have to go look for food that day. 

Taylor Martin 
[13:45] Right. You talked about water. You talked about paying the farmers. What are some other large hurdles that are before you right now that you’re trying to overcome? 

Karen Nicolas
[13:56] The largest hurdle is getting people to understand that they need to scale, and they need to take their tree home and not just plant it for that 15 cents. But they need to be able to have enough education, enough seminars over time to realize that cacao tree is going to provide me with – that one tree is going to provide me with enough profit to survive. And if I keep all 400 alive, then all of my family will be doing quite well, quite, quite well, especially because, well, the rest of the country isn’t like them. They don’t have all those trees. So getting that point across is a big hurdle. The other very practical big hurdle is getting water up the mountain in the dry season to bring back the water springs. We’ve gotten many ideas. Bring a bunch of those – the corrugated metal roofing. Put it on the mountainside and have it drain into some drums, and then have it drip down the mountain. And then when those trees are big enough, just move that – those apparatus to another mountainside. These ideas are great if we can build a project that someone will sponsor. 

There’s also a pump that you can make that requires no electricity. Where we are now and plenty of mountains to reforest, there’s a spring at the bottom of the mountain, and if you stick a pipe in it with something called a – I forgot the name of the pump, but it’s a pump that works off of the rhythm of the water pushing onto it, so it’s a banging sound. And it wastes a lot of water onto the ground near where the water spring is, but once you get it going, it will actually permanently suck water all the way up as far as you want up the mountain, and then it could drip down. So all that requires is a couple thousand dollars’ worth of piping. It can go quite far up to the top of the mountain, and of course, like I said, no electricity, no labor. Just keeping it under water at the end. 

Taylor Martin
[16:01] So education is something that you guys provide, correct? I mean, you’re providing this to the farmers and the locals? 

Karen Nicolas
[16:07] Absolutely. Yeah. No matter how much money we have, when people come and get a tree, we make them stop and listen. They show up at the nursery. They have to sit down and listen. They have to listen to, okay, you’re taking 10 trees. Okay, you can find enough manure and make sure that’s in the hole and make sure you plant it. And we’re going to come around and see.

Last year we had a motorcycle campaign, and we got money for a motorcycle. So every time we send trees to a village, we go and we supervise. We go and we say, hey, show me your trees. Whether we have money or not to actually photograph them and pay them to grow them, it’s not important, but if we can at least see, yeah, they’re in the ground. They’re planted. They’ve got mulch on them. Yeah, that’s what we do. And we don’t force – we don’t ask them to plant on the mountainside unless we can find it because we know they won’t be able to. But most people’s homes are on mountainsides, so it’s easy for them to plant next to their home and be providing more water for the spring at the same time. 

Taylor Martin
[17:07] How receptive is the community that’s around you where you’re doing all this planting? 

Karen Nicolas
[17:11] Oh, they absolutely love – when some sort of project comes into community of Haiti, everyone just protects it like it’s their baby. They don’t want anyone else to have it. They want it just for them. 

Taylor Martin
[17:26] Right. 

Karen Nicolas
[17:26] They see people coming in from other places to take trees, they’re like no, no, no. They’re talking to a leader. No, we’re going to plant these trees. We’re going to plant them. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. 

So people are very much protective of the project. They are constantly telling us what trees to grow, and that’s exactly what we grow. We grow every tree people want us to grow. Someone asked us for 500 cashew trees, so we grew 500 cashew trees, given that we’ve already seen that they have a good quality land for them. And it’s easy to grow a lot of trees in the nursery. It’s hard to get them to survive outside the nursery, so the biggest job is just simply getting partners, organizations, companies to realize, if we do the – if we pay to grow the trees, we’re going to be changing the dynamics of the whole reforestation market and turning it into something that’s really going to work. 

I work for a company called Greenstand. Sorry, it’s not a company, a nonprofit called Greenstand, and since 2015, they’ve been growing and – they’ve been developing a monitoring app to go around and take pictures of seedlings as they’re growing and have them show up on a map. So people can support those trees as they grow and watch them grow. And I’m actually helping people get started with that app all over the world. There’s huge projects in Africa. I’ve got 40,000 trees on the map in Haiti, and we’ve been following farmers that way. But finding donors for that app is still slow because they haven’t finished the interfaces. The organization is run by volunteers, so the developers are volunteers. So it’s slow as well. 

Taylor Martin 
[19:13] Shoestring budget. 

Karen Nicolas
[19:15] Yeah. They need to just get big funding for developing a wallet interface where they can just sell those tokens, and there are lots of companies grabbing onto the idea and taking that proof of life of that tree, that photograph that we take, and putting it into their gamification app. So that is started. There’s actually a company named Sadu, S-A-D-U, that is putting The Haiti Tree Project on their gamification app where you go out and exercise, and as you do exercise, you grow trees. So you start a running club, and you donate to the running club. It goes into the app. 

Taylor Martin 
[19:53] I love the whole gamification ideology. When I first heard about it years ago, I was just like, oh, this has legs. This has legs in so many different areas, so hearing you say this just makes me go uh-huh, uh-huh. I totally get it. When you can take something and make a game out of it and the outcome of your game that you’re playing actually helps something in the real world, love that, or just even education gamification, just learning things through games. I mean, I try to always reverse engineer all the games my kid plays on his little iPad to see if there are elements like that involved. 

You mentioned 40,000 trees you planted. I went to your website, thenhaititreeproject.org, and I have to say I love how – I went to the project history page. And I can see in a bullet form, which is very scannable, all the trees you guys have planted, and I love that. Because just as that app that you were talking about and just as this page is describing to me, it’s showing me proof in the pudding. You donate money. I just can’t stand it when you donate money to something, and then it just goes away and you never hear any feedback from it. You never hear the results of that money that you sent away, and so it's hard to give back again. But I see here on your website all these trees you’ve been planting. The last three years – last year you planted 33,000, and you have avocado, cashew, tamarin, breadnut, mango. I mean, the list goes on and on and on and on. And then, in 2020, which was a hard year, you guys still planted 22, 000 trees so very, very impressive. 

Can you tell us a little bit more about that app and how that works? You’re using it for the Haiti project as well? 

Karen Nicolas
[21:45] Yes. We’re using two apps right now. The Haiti Tree Project is finding out that there’s companies around the world that are developing these tree monitoring apps, but we prefer the Greenstand app because their mission is to pay the farmer to grow the trees. Their mission is to not just take a picture of that planted tree and get credit for planting a tree. Their mission is to continually have the farmer take pictures on their simple Android phone over – or the community’s Android phone over months, over years, and as that value increases, so does their income. So it’s in development still. You can use the app. You can trade tokens, but it doesn’t have a really good interface on their website just yet. 

What my job is is to take that app all over the world and give it to the small farmers and teach them how to use it. People in the smallest places in Uganda are calling me every day and saying how do I put my trees on the map too? Everyone wants their trees on the map. They’re getting them there, and slowly donors are coming. And they’re investing in these small farmers, and then the local organizations who have a website without a bank account are able to pay them. And in the future, we hope that the money apps are connected directly to the donors and people can directly communicate and donate to the farmers themselves. 

So using an app that has the GO tag and the timestamp turns the whole reforestation project into something that can be proven, and I encourage any donor to always go for reforestation projects that are proving their plantings with that technology and, as well, supporting that farmer for at least a year after that tree is planted. And Greenstand is using their app to prove that, to have the actual proof behind that. Yeah, so while we photographed 40,000 this past year, we’ve actually grown more than 100,000 because we can’t afford to photograph every one. A lot of people come and take trees home, and we don’t stop people. The trees are for free, so if people want to walk an hour or two to get a tree, we’re not going to stop them from taking it. We might lose track of that tree. 

Taylor Martin 
[24:11] Right. 

Karen Nicolas
[24:11] It’s easy to grow a lot of trees in the nursery and let people take them home. It’s hard to track them because that costs money, and it’s hard to plant them in large numbers on mountainsides. But that’s what we’re going to need to blanket this country, to blanket everywhere in the world. We’re going to need to pay for planting. We’re going to need to pay to grow and, of course, yeah, the education of keeping those trees alive. 

Taylor Martin 
[24:35] If there’s any corporates out there, corporate listeners, I think it would be great to pitch in and help these apps finish what they’ve started because having a beautiful interface and being able to provide that proof in the pudding, if you will, I think is paramount because it really – it allows people to get closer to it so they feel part of it because then they can see and read the progress. It’s not like I’m just throwing money, like I said earlier, just at something that I have no idea what’s coming back, or how it’s working, or how it’s operating, so I love that. Haiti has a population over 11 million people. I know you’re just one group. Are there other projects in Haiti that are also growing trees, or are you guys one of the few? 

Karen Nicolas
[25:19] I know a few. I know a few, CODEP. No, just a few. There’s one in Jacmel. There’s one outside of Port-au-Prince, in Léogâne. I don’t think they’re using any kind of app. They might be using satellites and working with universities. At least the one in CODEP has been pretty big and successful. They’ve been doing forests with people and money from churches from all over for many, many years, and they’ve done a good job. 

My project is a project where you can follow on our news page. Every week we post exactly what we’re doing, and every week we’re doing something else. And it’s small, but at the same time, we’re – I don’t receive any income as of yet. Until I get a large grant that has me written in the budget line, 100% of donations goes to Haiti. A little bit goes to marketing, and that’s it. We’ve been doing this for 10 years like that, and that’s what works for us because we can see so much change and so much effect from each dollar. You can support the nursery and the farmer for a tree with just a dollar for four months. 

Taylor Martin
[26:28] You just took the question – the answer right out of my mind. I was thinking how – what’s the percentage rate? How much of the donation goes to the tree planting? It’s 100%, and you’re basically just donating all of your time and effort into this project. That’s commendable, really impressive. 

Karen Nicolas
[26:45] Yeah. So far, I mean, that’s been the case with all of the individual donations up ‘til now. This one partner I have that’s giving a per planting, I’m hoping to start taking a percentage. But things are moving so fast in Haiti. The team there is constantly spending money, and I haven’t seen that window yet. But as long as I keep working with Greenstand and they keep paying me something, I’ll be able to continue volunteering. I have put, started putting a small percentage in for marketing, but we’re still doing 90% straight to Haiti. And I could say 100% of our individual donations because I’m not actually taking from those, if I look at my budget. 

Taylor Martin 
[27:24] I really like your website because it’s just – it’s to the point. You give a lot of background, a lot of data, a lot of information, and of course, I love that little Take Action button. Corporate donors, I could see them being – this is a great opportunity for them because you’re – no pun intended but a grassroots part of the project in terms of where you’re at right now, and a big corporate donor could come in and make a huge, huge impact for your organization, of course, as well as Haiti. I’m going to make a small impact here. I just went to your donation page, and I love how simple it is, just my email, how much I want to give. So I’m going to plant 1,000 trees. I’m going to go ahead and just fill all of this information out right now. 

Karen Nicolas
[28:05] That’s awesome. 

Taylor Martin
[28:07] And I’m going to hit Continue. It gives me Confirmation screen, Donate, excellent. There we go. I just donated 1,000 trees. 

Karen Nicolas
[28:16] Thank you so much. 

Taylor Martin 
[28:17] I hope some of our listeners out there might do the same, absolutely, my pleasure. Anytime I see somebody in need, I don’t care, I’ll donate something, whatever I can. Because to be honest with you, I feel like we all need to be doing that these days in every part of the world. When something comes into your view and walks across your path, you need to do something. If it’s small, medium, or large, do what you can. So I did and happy to do it. How can our listeners follow more? You mentioned about your newsletter? 

Karen Nicolas
[28:51] Yes. If you go on our webpage, our newsletter submission pops up. You can subscribe, and every week or two, we have just our daily diary of what’s been going on down in Haiti. For a while, we were writing about an earthquake, and now we’re writing about the rainy season and all the trees we’re planting. A big part of our project right now is breadfruit. We’re actually taking the whole agroforestry angle and doing it full circle. I haven’t mentioned that to you. Actually, we’re making [29:24], which are like a sweet baked good made out of breadfruit. 

So this region of Haiti where we are actually grows a lot of breadfruit trees naturally. They’ve been there. They haven’t been cut down, and so we’re turning that breadfruit from pig food, which is basically being wasted on the ground every year, to a flour that can be put into any kind of food. You can put it in your morning cereal. You can put it in bread. You can put it in all kinds of baked goods. You can fry it. We’re actually getting a dehydrator for all kinds of fruits, and we’re going to be able to massively produce food that they can use when it’s the dry season. So lots of great things going on. 

Taylor Martin
[30:06] It sounds like you having a lot of different facets of your organization and everywhere – you start to tell the story.

Karen Nicolas
[30:11] [Laughs]

Taylor Martin
[30:12] It’s like another avenue of how you’re helping the Haitian people. So again, I just have to commend you for what you’re doing and your efforts, and I hope that our listeners feel the same. And again, you can go to thehaititreeproject.org to learn more, to sign up for the newsletter, and follow my lead and make a donation, whatever you can. I think this is a worthy cause, absolutely, especially the fact that there’s not a lot of organizations that are doing it. They are a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, just so you know. Karen, thank you so much for being on today’s show and telling us your story. I did sign up for your newsletter, and I look forward to following your progress. 

Karen Nicolas
[30:50] Thank you so much, Taylor. It’s great to meet you. 

Taylor Martin
[30:52] Thank you so much. Over and out, everybody. 

[Upbeat theme music plays]

Female Voice Over 
[30:55] Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is Founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewed on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you’re logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.