Hi, I’m Marie-Claire,
founder of Trees & People
I am an Urban and Community Tree Planting Consultant raised and educated in South East London. I bring both lived and professional experience of the communities that urban greening initiatives should be prioritising.
In 2019 I co-founded the charity Street Trees for Living, helping to grow a volunteer-led initiative into a staffed, multi-borough organisation raising more than £2.5m and planting over 3,000 trees.
My drive behind creating the charity was to bridge the gap between local people and landowners. Consequently I have worked at the intersection of local authorities and communities; fundraising, building trusted partnerships and designing scalable programmes, making tree planting and aftercare a shared community success.
Through Trees & People I am now focusing on supporting public bodies and voluntary, community and social enterprises to fund and design planting programmes that are inclusive, collaborative and built to last.
Why I founded Trees & People and what I believe
As a community we have become disconnected from the natural world, seeing ourselves as separate from it and no longer a part of it. This has had devastating impacts on our mental and physical well-being and on the ecosystem at large.
One conseqeunce of this is that the urban environment is often viewed as an area that competes with nature, rather than as an opportunity to facilitate it. A contributing issue is when landowners are charged with sole responsibility for the maintenance of green infrastructure, often without the resources or funding to ensure that this greenery thrives.
But there is another way…
The stewardship of trees, plants and wildlife needs to be shared with local communities and residents, and this is exactly the work I drive; co-created, community-led, long-lasting. I believe that environmental justice is social justice. Everyone should have access to nature no matter where they live, and when communities invest in green space the benefits reach far beyond the environment; improving health, strengthening connection and helping people rediscover their relationship with the natural world.
