by Derek Schubert, ASLA, Coordinator of the Sierra Club Tree Team
Thanks to our volunteers, the Sierra Club Tree Team has planted around 300 trees in Oakland since mid-November, and roughly 1,500 trees in total since 2010. We hope you can join us. We’ll provide the shovels, gloves, and other tools and supplies.
When: Most Saturdays at 9am, and some Sundays, and even the occasional weekday. Join us as often as your schedule allows it. Please be on time so you can get our orientation and safety-briefing.
Where: We usually meet at our staging area in Fruitvale (Epic School, 1122 29th Avenue, southeast side of the street between East 12th Street and the railroad tracks), but if we’re planting in a different neighborhood or at a park, we’ll just meet there.
More information / sign up: General Meetup page for the Sierra Club — http://www.meetup.com/sanfranciscobay/
General info on the Tree Team — http://sierraclub.org/sfbay/tree-planting
School greening — design/planning expertise:
You can help bring more trees to Oakland’s tree-starved schools. The expanses of asphalt paving, bare lawns, and chainlink fence are holdovers from a “minimal maintenance” mentality of decades past. Recent studies show that these harsh physical environments are stunting children’s learning, attention, and social skills.
The Sierra Club Tree Team, along with its partners the Oakland Parks & Recreation Foundation and Keep Oakland Beautiful, has received a grant to plant 1,500 trees in the flatlands of Oakland over the next few years. Several schools qualify for trees under this grant. Individual schools will form their own greening committees (teachers, staff, students, parents, neighbors) to discuss their goals and set priorities, but they will need help from landscape architects to develop conceptual plans. Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) would review the plans and choices of trees. Derek Schubert, Coordinator of the Sierra Club Tree Team, is a registered landscape architect and has worked on 6 schools, but can’t work on every school by himself. Fees (if any) for design services will depend on the school: some may have no money and ask for pro bono design, but others may have money for design services.
Contact Derek Schubert, SCTreePlanting@gmail.com, for more information.
