Tree planting with Haribon

Earlier in the year, I co-organized a charity fund-raising fun run in the office for the benefit of Haribon and Kythe. We raised more than P130,000 from pledges made for the more than 100 volunteer runners, and this amount was split between Haribon and Kythe. Our donation to Haribon was equivalent to almost 700 trees and we decided to organize an actual tree-planting activity so that we could plant the seedlings we donated.


We worked with Haribon to set up a date and decided to stage our activity on November 13. The venue was Tanay, Rizal, which has been a priority area for reforestation ever since Ondoy. We managed to get 50 volunteers - any more than that and each person would end up planting very few trees. As luck would have it, the Shangri-la hotel also had a tree-planting activity on that day and had 2,000 seedlings to plant but they didn't have a lot of volunteers themselves. We ended up helping Shangri-la plant their trees, which meant that our volunteers got to have a more worthwhile experience as they were not constrained by planting only a few seedlings in under an hour.


I took on the task of being photographer which proved to be a bit difficult since I didn't want to get mud in my camera. This meant that I managed to plant only a few trees but it was great to see the other volunteers fully immersed in and totally committed.


We are planning a bigger tree planting activity - more trees and more volunteers - next June. It'll take a lot more work to pull it off successfully and smoothly but I am definitely looking forward to it.