Today I want to celebrate Earth Day but telling you about one of my favorite organizations, Floresta. One of my dearest friends (Sarah, who has guest blogged here and shared a lot of her personal research with me) works for them, and I just love hearing about what they are doing.
The motto of Floresta is "Healing the Land and its People" and it exists to do a few specific things:
- Teach community development as a means to empowerment
- Plant with innovative agriculture and forestry to enable farmers to become self-sufficient
- Create credit, helping people to afford to progress beyond bare subsistence
- Share the Gospel, with discipleship occuring through long-term relationships and building servant leaders
Floresta just launched a new initiative called Plant With Purpose, which is a new online community that connects people with nearly 200 villages being served worldwide. On the new website, we have the opportunity to step inside the regions where Floresta works and view their specific needs firsthand. For every recurring donation, the amount will be matched for a year!
Our family supports a village in Mexico, called Ojo de Agua. We love getting updates that tell us specifically how "our" village is doing and growing. I really hope to someday visit our village and/or somewhere in the Dominican Republic, another country where Floresta and Plant With Purpose works.
Here's an awesome video (I love the music and the graphic style of it) about Plant With Purpose. I hope you'll watch it and that maybe some of you will be moved to join in the campaign to fight poverty with reforestation and agricultural education. {If you read GGH in a reader, you may have to click over to view the video-- it's worth it!} You can also visit the Get Involved page to see how you help Plant With Purpose's work in specific villages, and you can also check out how you can make a difference by planting trees.
Don't forget to enter my Lunapads giveaway!