Please help us recruit more volunteers to plant trees!

Volunteers are crucial to the success of Trees for Life, so please make a donation now to help us keep our volunteer programmes available to as wide a range of people as possible.

Dear Supporter,

Ever since Trees for Life began practical work in 1989, volunteers have been an essential part of our project, carrying out crucial tasks such as planting trees, collecting seeds and helping in our tree nursery. As our volunteer programmes have grown over the years, so have their costs, and much of our fundraising is directed towards them. It’s vital for us to keep our programmes accessible to as many people as possible, through providing subsidised places on them, so I’m writing today to ask for your help in raising £15,000 for this.

Many of the people who are inspired to volunteer with us come from diverse backgrounds - they are often students, people who are in between jobs, are retired or are unemployed. They have the time available to come and volunteer for a week or more, and taking part in our programmes can be a very meaningful and rewarding experience for them. As a result, half of the participants on our Conservation Holiday volunteer weeks pay the unwaged rate of £80 (or £72 for someone who is a member of Trees for Life), whereas it actually costs us about £300 per volunteer per week to run the programme, so we are subsdising most of the cost. Similarly, our Green Days Out programme for local volunteers, which takes place most Wednesdays, attracts people who are not in full time work, and we are providing subsidised places on it too.

Our partner organisations, such as the RSPB and Forestry Commission Scotland (FCS), are very positive and appreciative about the quality of the work carried out by our volunteers. It is due to the passion and commitment of the volunteers that most of our forest restoration tasks are done, so please send a donation today to help us keep this success story going!

European Year of Volunteering is the ideal time to support our volunteers!

With 2011 having been designated the European Year of Volunteering by the European Union, there’s a major focus on promoting volunteering Europe-wide, so please join in with this by sending a donation to support our volunteer programmes. Your contribution now will help us reach our target of £15,000 – a donation of £25 will subsidise a volunteer on a day trip, while £220 will subsidise an unwaged person on a volunteer week. Better still, why not send a donation and then come and volunteer as well? Our autumn 2011 programme of Conservation Holidays begins on 27th August, and there are still places available on a number of the weeks.

Here’s why we need your support for our volunteer programmes:

• Our volunteer programmes offer people a unique opportunity to engage in positive and practical work to help restore the Caledonian Forest. In the next year, with the aid of our volunteers, we aim to plant 50,000 trees at Dundreggan and carry out vital forest restoration work at the RSPB’s Corrimony Reserve and at FCS sites in Glen Affric and Glen Moriston.


• We want to keep our programmes available to the widest possible range of people, and for those without a regular income it’s essential that we continue to provide places at low cost. It is often those who do not have the focus of full time work in their own lives that gain the most from volunteering with us.


• Our Green Days Out programme has been funded this year by a grant from the Big Lottery Fund, but that runs out in September, so we need to raise the money to keep it going in 2012 and beyond. This programme enables people to volunteer with us on a day basis, and tackles tasks that don’t require a whole group for a week.


• We’ve recently signed up as a partner in the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity, which has developed out of the International Year of Biodiversity in 2010. We’ve also applied to a grant-giving trust for a grant for training and equipment, so that we can add biodiversity surveying and identification to our Conservation Holidays programme, thereby increasing the skill and effectiveness of our volunteers.

Volunteers are vital to our project - please help keep them working with us!

Volunteers carry out most of the practical work on our project, and when I founded Trees for Life I was a volunteer myself in the initial years, before we had any paid staff. In many ways, the charity has been grown by volunteers – their efforts make all the difference to our success. Please make a donation now, to help us continue offering subsidised places on our programmes to people who are unwaged or on low incomes.

Yours sincerely,

Alan Watson Featherstone
Executive Director

PS. Our last appeal, for the planting of our millionth tree, raised over £12,000 – my thanks to everyone who contributed to that. With your donation now, we aim to surpass that total with this appeal for our volunteer programmes!