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| In the early 1970s, while Dave and Grace Deppner served as volunteers in developing countries around the world, they took note of the human tragedy brought on by illegal logging and unsustainable land management
systems. Families who could no longer sustain themselves on their farmland turned to find work in cities where they were marginalized and struggled to put food on the
table. |
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| Working with community leaders, the Deppners
began to find ways to offer hope to villagers by reestablishing productive lands - with their families
and culture intact. They renewed degraded lands by providing farmers with beneficial tree seed, technical training, and
on-site planning assistance. People responded enthusiastically.
Entire villages joined in, making great sacrifices to save their
homes and way of life. |
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| Johnny Ipil-Seed |
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| One very productive and popular tree
in our current program is Leucaena lecuocephala, known in the Philippines as "Ipil
Ipil." As the Deppners carried seeds from village to village, kids began
calling them "Johnny Ipil-Seed." The name stuck and is now what we call our quarterly newsletter. |
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| As Dave and Grace returned from their
overseas assignments they continued their work in tree planting, communicating with rural community
leaders about scarce natural resources, and providing information on tree-planting techniques that would help. They sent seeds to these communities, along with manuals, books, posters and other materials in several different languages. |
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| By the mid-1980s, many Americans
were becoming increasingly aware that worldwide deforestation, by then
destroying an area of forest larger than New England each year, was
beginning to threaten the global community. Many of them began to support
the Deppner's tree planting work that was bringing life back to increasingly devastated landscapes.
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| On August 14, 1988, Trees for the Future was incorporated
as a 501 (c) (3) public charity in Maryland. In the 19 years since, TREES has built a network
of more than 3,000 members across North America and has been acknowledged as a leader in developing-country reforestation and agroforestry technology in seedbed management, transplanting,
livestock forage systems, and other innovative techniques.. |
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| TREES has assisted
thousands of villages in Asia, Africa and Latin America in planting up to 50 million trees. These trees have restored
sustainably productive life to over 25,000 acres of land that had
previously been degraded and abandoned. The trees offer food, fodder, fuel and medicine for the farmers as well as shade, fertilizer and biodiversity for the landscape. |
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| The Ruppe Center |
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| Loret
Miller Ruppe was the director of the US Peace Corps throughout
the 1980s. She took an almost defunct, certainly dispirited, organization,
lacking in direction and purpose, and turned it into an action-oriented
program all Americans can be proud of. |
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| Ruppe visited all of the countries where
volunteers were serving - more than 100 countries. She didn't stay
in five star hotels, but went to the field, talking
and learning not only from the volunteers but from the people they
worked with. Her experience led her to understand that peace can best be achieved through economic development.
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| The Center has had hundreds of visitors from all over the world.
Many come asking our help to start tree-planting projects. Others come to learn
if there are things they can do to solve the problems their communities
face. Some have returned from an overseas assignment to exchange
perspectives and experiences. For all of us, it's a place for ideas. It's also a place where we develop
new technology and, with the help the Internet and other modern communications systems,
make it available to all who ask - anywhere in the world. |
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| Visit us: Directions to the Ruppe Center |
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