Sally Clegg: Trees for Survival spokesperson on the organisation's bid to plant 1 million more trees by 2030

Since its founding in 1990, the Trees for Survival Charitable Trust has encouraged schoolkids to plant one million trees and shrubs - and it's aiming for a million more by 2030.

Through Kiwi schools, national environmental education and a restoration programme Trees for Survival has helped Kiwi kids learn more about the environment.

Trees for Survival spokesperson Sally Clegg says the charity encourages students to feel like the trees they planted are their trees.

"We don't take them out to nurseries and do it there, they have a nursery which we provide in their schools. They will grown between 800 and 1,000 native seedlings, which are all eco-sourced for their area."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudgin
from News Talks EDB.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Now a bold tag. It has been set by one
of our environmental charities through Kiwi Schools National Environmental Education
and Restoration program, Trees for Survival has planted one million
trees and shrubs. But why stop there? This set a
new lofty goal to plant one million more by twenty thirty.
Sally Clig from Trees for Survival joins me. Now, good morning, Sally.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
Oh Dana.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
What would it take to get another than million trees
planted in five years?

Speaker 3 (00:40):
Well, we've probably planted over two million trees up to now,
but we started counting probably not in our very first year.
Tree for Survival has been flying under the radar for
about thirty years now, thirty four years actually from when
it first started. So to get another million trees in
the ground we've planted, we're just tallying out the last trees.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
Now.

Speaker 3 (01:03):
We've planted one hundred and seventy thousand this year with
two hundred and thirty three schools, So I've just done
the sums on that, and that takes us to nine
hundred and ninety nine thousand, five hundred and seventy or
something so and we are taking on between ten and
thirty school new schools each. I think we might even
do it in four years.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
What do you think, Well, why not just tell us
a little bit about Trees for Survival and what you do.

Speaker 3 (01:28):
Treval was a rotary initiated program that started about thirty
four years ago with the Rotary Club in Pakaranga East
and they started off with the view that and it
was a very lofty goal really, you know, to sort
of think back in nineteen ninety that we should have
trees for survival and we what we do is we

(01:49):
get we work with schools and we will And the
unique thing about True for Survival is that the school children,
the students feel that these are their trees because they're
growing them at school. So we don't take them out
to nurseries and do it there. They have a nursery
which we provide in their school. They will grow between
eight hundred and on thousand native seedlings which are all

(02:10):
ecosourced for their area, and those trees then are planted
out as a local site. So these sites are assessed
by our facilitators and then they're monitored for three years
after planting.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
And it's not just about planting, it's also there's quite
a bit of education involved in this too. Yes.

Speaker 3 (02:28):
I mean when I got out of a planting day
and I talked to a group of students, you know,
it started off where I'd say to students, like, what
are the benefits of doing this? And they'd say things
like firewood or wood chips, and it was very much
thinking about what we get out of it, and it
was just changing that mindset to thinking, Okay, think bigger,
think planet, you know, what are the benefits And then

(02:49):
they would start thinking about, oh, birds, maybe you know,
food to the birds, habitat for the birds. And then
they think about the stream that they were planting alongside,
and they would say, oh, okay, yeah, we're filtering the runoff,
we're clearing up that stream were so they'd see all
those other benefits from that. We decided that that was
quite a big ass to say for the teacher. Now

(03:10):
follow that up in the classroom. So we have written
an education resource which we'll go into schools and it's
curriculum aligned. We've had to sort of make sure with
all the different changes of curriculum that we've got it
curriculum aligned, so that is now something that is in
the classroom and it makes it easier for the teachers.
And bearing in mind that a lot of our students
and teachers are coming from overseas and don't know our

(03:34):
native trees.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
You know.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
I've had conversations with one teacher said to me, I
don't know the difference between the flax and apahuda kawa.
So we thought, okay, right, we know where we're starting.
Let's let's get a resource out there that helps people
to learn about the native trees and then know the
benefits of putting them in the ground in the right place.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
Sally, we've got a real focus at the moment on,
you know, getting our kids into the classroom reading and
writing and doing their mess and things in it, and
that is very important. But I mean, I can remember
doing this at my primary school in the late seventies
and early eighties. I feel like schools we've been planting
for years, decades. What do the kids get out of
something like this?

Speaker 3 (04:13):
Oh, it's amazing and I think, you know, I had
a conversation with a primary school student recently who was
obviously really concerned about all these big weather events and
things that they'd heard about climate change. And I sort
of had to say, listen, you can't solve that problem
you by yourself. For what you can do is you
can get out into your back yard and you can
do something about your local stream and about your local area.

(04:37):
And then you know your contribution. People, all those benefits
we've just talked about, You know that you're contributing to
this and you're helping. And if everybody did that, and
you could sort of see this sense of relief from
this small child who had taken of all this worry
and he ended up saying, right, I'm going to go
back home to my mum and tell us I've done
something to save the planet today. But there's that, you know,

(04:58):
so at that age. But also often when you're talking
to primary school children, they asked the really big questions,
you know that with in five minutes of starting, they'll say, well,
what's soil made of?

Speaker 1 (05:09):
Well? Why is it?

Speaker 3 (05:10):
You know, and all these questions just keep keep coming
at you, you know, and and it's very interesting to
let them have those discussions and just listen in as
they're planting, when they find wounds and they find insects
and then renaming all the insects and that sort of
experiential learning that I think is so important. And this
is this is why I think Tree Survival is so valued.

(05:33):
We've had schools that started with thirty odd years ago
and they're still with us. We're now planting the children
of the parents who did the program with us.

Speaker 2 (05:41):
I love it.

Speaker 3 (05:42):
It's great, isn't it so? And then that's been passed
on and the parents come along to health. But we
did that, you did you know, we did this and
we loved it.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
Now I can, as I said, Sally, I can remember
doing it myself as well. Thank you so much. A
bitst of lagged. I think your team might be a
little but freaked out that you've just brought the deadline
for it a year early. That was Sally klig there
for from Trees for Survival.

Speaker 1 (06:03):
For more from the Sunday session with Franchessca, run can
listen live to Use Talks at B from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.