About Us – Mission, Programs, Initiatives

Congressman Xavier Becerra 31st District, Youth Environmental Stewards '05 photo by Adan Areola.

North East Trees is a nonprofit environmental and youth education organization with a mission “to restore nature’s services to improve the quality of life in resource-challenged communities.”  Founded nearly 20 years ago, North East Trees has:

1. planted over 30,000 trees,
2. created over 35 parks and other landscape improvements including habitat restoration along the Los Angeles River and across Los Angeles County;  and,
3. engaged, trained and employed thousands of local youth to achieve this mission.

The North East Trees “story” begins with a simple, yet powerful, motto – “More Trees Are Better” -- from founder Scott Wilson.  As an educator, landscape architect and community activist, his goal was to plant five trees per day. While doing so he inspired people, especially local youth, to participate through education and engagement.

While tree plantings are still critical to fulfilling the mission, North East Trees also designs and builds parks and landscape improvements that restore habitat while developing neighborhood and community capacity to nurture or steward these improvements and the environment in general. 

“We at North East Trees consider it very much part of our Mission and culture to lead by example,” said Larry Smith, Executive Director for North East Trees.   “We ‘Walk the Walk’ by designing and building projects that are innovative and set new sustainable design standards that can be used by others.  We hire youth from the community and develop youth and community stewards who will care and protect their neighborhoods and provide sustainability for these projects.”

North East Trees Programs include:

1. Urban Forestry – develops urban forestry solutions for agencies and other organizations within a framework that maximizes the net environmental benefits of the urban forest resource.  North East Trees participates in the Million Trees LA (MTLA) Campaign through its “Creating Community One Tree at a Time” Initiative; and the Los Angeles Dept. of Water & Power Trees for Green LA Project through implementation of this Urban Forestry approach .
2. Urban Parks Development – plans, designs and builds community, neighborhood and river adjacent parks and trails for the purpose of restoring native habitat and creating passive recreation opportunities.  Maywood Bike Access Park and the LA River Bikeway Improvements are specific projects of this program.
3. Watershed Rehabilitation – plans, designs and implements watershed improvements with the express purpose of restoring waterways and associated habitat, improving water quality and safely increasing stormwater detention.  Specific projects within this program area include the Oros Green Street and Hazard Stream-Wetland Restoration projects. 
4. Youth Environmental Stewardship – educates and trains at-risk youth and young adults in environmental disciplines designed to build individual character and to develop a community-based work force to steward restored nature’s services in resource challenged communities.
5. Community Stewardship – assists communities and neighborhoods in the development of resources, capacity and network links that can steward restored nature’s services in resource challenged communities.

In addition, North East Trees has integrated these core service areas to deploy two major initiatives:

1. Creating Community One Tree At A Time – its purpose is to develop youth and community stewards who can develop tree planting projects, and plant and care for trees in their respective resource challenged communities
2. Green Way L.A. – its purpose is to look carefully at all urban infrastructure improvement projects through a new lens that first asks the question:  How can we restore nature’s services while providing for the public, health and welfare of the community?  Our practice and legacy of building green infrastructure has always embraced restoring nature’s services while beautifying, so we have planted native trees, built parks and access points along the Los Angeles River using local and recycled materials.  Green Way L.A. will add another layer of functionality to these projects by taking the next step of also cleaning and storing stormwater runoff, thereby making all urban infrastructure part of the solution.