Torin Dunnavant

Director of Engagements and Partnerships at TreePeople

Torin Dunnavant: So, uh. I started working in the non-profit field, the environmental non-profit fields over 10 years ago initially. I was really involved with river conservation in northern California. And started working on it professionally and really enjoyed not just the outcomes or the goals, but the environment too. The manner in which people went about pursuing environmental remedies, and the way people treated each other within the field. I feel that people are supportive of one another and rather than being competitive, it is very coalition based.

I eventually found myself in LA. And was lucky enough to start working for TreePeople. TreePeople is an environmental non-profit that’s specific to LA country. Our goal is to get as many people in Los Angeles involved with bringing more nature into the city. It’s very important that Los Angeles becomes a more sustainable place to live but the only way we feel that can be achieved is by community action. And so, I’ve been here for now over 5 years and am involved deeply with bring new people, new constituents into the organization and thinking about ways that we can engage those constituents in our area’s programming. We have lots of stuff people can do: volunteer in urban forestry, mountain forestry, they can participate in environmental education programs, they can learn about solutions for their own properties, and they can also advocate for sustainable changes on a city wide or political level. So we want to get people doing those things and what we really want them to do is to grow. We want people to go from an average volunteer to somebody who’s a community leader, leading their community in urban forestry, or whatever environmental remedies they want to pursue. So we have all our programming established to almost allow people a step-by-step opportunity in becoming the most passionate environmental activist they can. So, I’ve really enjoyed it, its very rewarding work and we meet some of the most amazing people in Los Angeles in doing it.

Ross Silverman: I agree, I’ve noticed that first hand from the times that I’ve spent working with you as well. What can you tell us about the policy changes people have helped enact?

Torin: Yeah, so, the organization has been around for over 40 years, and definitely the environment has changed, or I guess the way that governance looks at the environment has changed. I think our luck to be connected with so many different people in Los Angeles is sort of like creating that change. More people are more willing to be involved in environmental needs. I think that subtly changed policies where we see more politics being pro environment, I guess. But only recently has the organization actually directly participated in environmental advocacy. Those issues that we’ve been recently involved in have been around the utilization of storm water as an asset rather than something to get rid of, which has to do with building design, and then just the way public right of ways process storm water, and then of course, we’ve been involved with urban forestry issues so that we can make sure that these, which are not really supporting the urban forest needs as much as they should advocating on behalf to get more funding in those arenas. So that we can have a more healthy urban system.

Ross: Yeah, that’s fantastic.

Torin: Our goals as an organization is to get more and more deep into it. Supporting people and their efforts directly, if they have an issue they want to advocate we can support them on. Helping them there, then of course, just thinking more holistically about what the needs for urban areas are and how advocacy and policy changes can lead to that.

Ross: Yeah, definitely. What the class that we are talking about we are focusing a lot on the community engagement the organizations how people can help enact change themselves. As well as the messages these organizations and these leaders can impart on the community. Do you have anything to say about the community engagement aspects of this?

Torin: That’s the important thing. For people to truly be engaged, they have to lead. Out whole model of citizen forestry is central to that. We a long time ago as an organization we knew that it was important to plant trees in the city. So we started planting trees and we would come back and realize that all the trees weren’t doing all that well after we had left. So what we started to do was connect more closely with the communities and found that there were people that were willing to be leaders in their neighborhoods to plant trees, for example. And actually, after they did that, they could organize their neighborhood better and that after the planting occurred, they would be a lot more likely to care for the trees. It was a very direct benefit of supporting communities through citizen forestry model. The much deeper indirect benefit is, that exercise where somebody says “I want to see my community become a more vibrant place”, when that comes to fruition, it sort of builds momentum and it creates interconnectedness between the people that live there and they’re a lot more likely to pursue other remedies as well, or they may have been doing something else and they get to urban forestry eventually, but we’ve seen through our programming people who go from planting trees to creating community watch groups, graffiti abatement teams, you know, basically creating a much deeper social fabric in their neighborhoods, which is really what LA lacks if you were just to take it to heart the ways our city is built is to keep people separated, but really what we need is people connected. So, as it comes to advocacy, people feel voiceless when they first arrive in Los Angeles, especially in underserved communities. And, when they recognize, “oh, I can fight this deal with just a little bit of planning and organizing my neighborhood I can accomplish something pretty profound.” It’s momentum building. And so, I see many neighborhoods becoming a lot more active and not just in urban forestry, but in overall sustainability and social justice even. The communities can express their own leadership and that’s making up for a much more healthy city to live in.

Ross: I’ve also noticed that TreePeople has a lot of allies in non-profit organizations to help enact these changes. What can you say about these allies?

Torin: Yeah, I’d love to. So, we actually like to talk about the metaphor of the forest. So, a natural forest is a really well oiled machine, because it’s evolved to succeed. So in a natural forest you have all sorts of nice sustainable things going on. Waste is being recycled, energy is being conserved, water is being conserved, but also what happens in a natural forest is there’s interspecies interdependence, that birds propagate, plants, that permaculture helps to aerate soil, give it nutrients, microorganisms and fungal activity are really beneficial for plant life. That’s the same thing that needs to happen in a city for it to succeed. Things that are working towards basically the same goals are much better off working together. We’ve been around for a long time, but over our years, we have been happy to connect with other organizations who are doing similar things. For instance, Heal the Bay in another big organization here in Los Angeles that accomplishes a lot of wonderful things, a lot of having to do with water quality. We care about water quantity. Those are very complimentary and so, we’ll work together with them. We’ll pursue curriculums in classrooms together, we’ll do projects out in the field together, and certainly we’ll work on advocacy issues together. So that’s been real great. There are lots of other organizations that I would consider to be on the same non-profit level, like Bay Keeper, Surf Rider, Theodore Payne Foundation, Sustainable Works, things like that. The other groups that we are excited to work with are community-based organizations. So we know that most underserved parts of Los Angeles economically, are the most underserved environmentally as well. They have the lowest canopies, the most pollution et cetera. There are awesome groups who are doing good work on a whole host of issues there so it’s been a really good symbiotic relationship, where we can see a physical transformation with the goals that we have, like planting more trees in underserved communities by acting with groups that are already there that are deeply connected to neighborhoods, Like (unintelligible name), been doing really great work that we’ve connected with over the years. So, they don’t have to invent programming that we already have because they’re interested in seeing environmental positive changes in their neighborhoods and we not necessarily very good at connecting with people in Pacoima or Inglewood, necessarily. We don’t necessarily have programming fine-tuned to what that community would most feel comfortable with, so we can have an open conversation with those groups. We can adapt out programming and fold our work in with what they are already doing and it’s been a really nice outcome. And the other thing, I’d like to mention, is, because I forgot to talk about it before while we were talking about advocacy, is as an organization, we don’t just work with non-profits and individuals, we are also deeply connected to the agencies that are kind of overseeing everything in LA.  Department of Water and Power, you know, they have a lot of control over what happens in LA environmentally and so we’ve been lucky to develop memorandums of understanding with them that keep us independent and we can speak truth to power about them, but they’re happy to listen and we’re happy to gain from that partnership and increase our access to different programs and we can advise them on how things would be more proactive for Los Angeles and they can give us more access to their constituents through programs like the rain barrel incentive program or something like that.

Ross: Yeah, I also know that from what we were talking about earlier, opportunity and empowerment  is a major aspect of this organization. The different communities and the different ways the people can help the community, just as the community can help the people as well.

Torin: Yeah, definitely. It almost was like an unintended consequence of our work, to recognize that community empowerment was key. We knew that LA needed to be a more sustainable place for people to live in, but we realized that the purpose of our work is not physical greening, it’s this community greening for people who live in Los Angeles. There is so much room for positive growth that it’s so much easier for people and it’s so much more rewarding and it enables community empowerment.

Ross: Definitely

Joe Eyen: Ask about how they’re bringing in new people?

Ross: So, we’re really curious as to how TreePeople branches out to new people and how new bridges and new organizations and new allies can form from your roots, basically.

Torin: So yeah, it’s definitely a constant effort. First, we want to connect with as many people as possible. I think one way we’ve managed to do that is by having a whole wide array of different programs for people to participate in. So, I mentioned volunteering, and environmental sustainable solutions and advocacy and what we are really trying to do by having those different elements is not just accomplish the physical goals, the tangible goals of those programs but to meet people where they are. So, not everyone can necessarily come out and volunteer, so we can give them programming they can apply in their own spaces. Obviously, young people is a really important thing, because they are beautiful change makers. So working in classrooms is really important, so we have a multitude of different programs, whether it’s field trips or service learning, or eco club support. So that’s definitely a big factor for us, to make ourselves diverse. I did mention that it’s been a great symbiotic relationship to work with community-based organizations in communities. I think we learned that after we tried it on our own. Trying to make ourselves known in communities where we weren’t know. We were finding that it took a long time, so partnering has been a really great engagement tool as well and it also definitely increases the learning process. But there’s so much knowledge that exists from other people’s experience, we should gain that, rather than experiencing the same foibles that they experienced as well. It’s very important to think big picture, without programming to be as good at listening as we are at applying our programming, so we try to build in feedback loops, because we’re lucky enough to have people who come to workshops and come to volunteer with us regularly, but we need to make sure that the people who are coming are getting the most out of it. So we try to build in opportunities for people to share with us who they felt about the programming and then update the programming based on that, and that’s a bit of a difficult thing to do, constantly changing, but we definitely cut ourselves some time to accomplish that.

Ross: I definitely know that with all the workshops and all the events centered around first of all community building, second of all leadership, that a lot of more people are starting to feel empowered, especially after leaving these events. I’ve definitely noticed a change in these events from when I was helping to work at them.

Torin: Yeah, for sure. I appreciate that. I’m glad you felt that way, it’s definitely been an ongoing process, we’re actually engaging a new concept to improve our programming, called community based social marketing, which is sort of like using science thinking directly in implementation. We’re starting to embrace that as we speak.

Ross: That’s awesome. I was just about to ask about new policies, or new changes that have been going on at TreePeople or the community in general?

Torin: Yeah, it’s a big one, what that would do for us would be to not just, and we have a lot of really great people who work here, we have a lot of amazing volunteers, but programs are built in a vacuum sometimes, we certainly can receive feedback from people, but that’s based on their own conscious efforts to give us feedback. What community based social marketing would enable us to do, would be to do straight up, like control and test applications for changes and use quantified techniques, surveying techniques, to figure out what your goals and objectives are for certain communities, so that will be nice. The other thing is as a manner of making sure our programming is well applied, and accessible is we need to be more technologically savvy, so making our workshops online accessible, so that’s a big effort right now. We’ll roll out a new website that has online tools that can inspire people to make changes at home. Actually, one of those, the tool that we already have out there is called TreeMap. Enabling people to become scientists in their own fields, their own homes and neighborhoods, and then sharing with us what they’ve already accomplished because they can do things like map the urban forest in their neighborhood, but can also map rain water harvesting solutions in their neighborhood too. And that’s really helpful and also pretty inspiring for people to see.

Ross: Yeah, definitely.

Joe: So you’ve talked a lot about reaching out to new people, about giving them the tools to those people and when there is change, make the change long lasting. Any of those things, or other things what do you see as the biggest challenge to your goals? Where do you find the roadblocks? Yeah, what’s the biggest challenges?

Torin: Yeah, the biggest challenge is scaling, right? So, we can do a lot with direct connection to the people, and we have done a lot in the last 40 years, but issues, that LA is experiencing environmentally, are profound and bigger than the speed of our programming. The biggest challenge is figuring out how we can get a lot more people participating in leadership, especially, urban forestry here, making changes, doing sustainable things in their own homes, without as much support as we would normally give somebody. With a citizen forester, it takes a long time for people to plant things in their neighborhoods, on one block. We need to be able to do that to get trees planted. People have to care for urban spaces and we need a lot more people who recognize that. At this point we have barely scratched the surface, but if the theory of social development fusion says you have about 6% of society is the innovator and then 13% are the early adaptors, we have figure out how to get beyond the early adaptors as soon as possible. And have them backing. People are open to action, it’s kind of a sweet science about how you get them to there. Like how just a good idea doesn’t get people to act. Honestly, not just having an incentive doesn’t get them to act. So it’s a lot of smart marketing and programmatic application, and of course the remote support to get people to do good things, on a much greater scale then we’re doing right now.

Ross: Exactly. Especially in Los Angeles, that’s so diverse and so large, that it’s definitely hard to organize people.

Torin: What we’re looking to do doesn’t exist anywhere else yet. We just need a bunch of people, let’s say 15% of LA makes a positive step in the next 5 years, that’s what needs to happen.

Ross: That’s a very ambitious goal, but I have a feeling that if anybody can reach it, I think you and your network definitely can.

Torin: That’s awesome, I appreciate that.

Joe: Would you say there is anything unique about being a non-profit in Los Angeles?

Torin: Well, do you ask that on the non-profit to not non-profit scale, or Los Angeles non-profit versus other city non-profits?

Joe: The second one. Like how a non-profit behaves.

Torin: In Los Angeles. I mean, I worked in Northern California, and in San Francisco, environmental organizations are sort of mass accepted. Their programs may not be as widely distributed nearly as much as ours is, but they aren’t really having to swim upstream and share with people, while Los Angeles isn’t as knowledgeable about environmental needs. But what I think that means is, we can make a first impression on folks. In San Francisco they’re building rooftop gardens on top of rooftop gardens. And Los Angeles has is a crazy amount of people and a crazy amount of space, while it’s going to take more time to persuade people, there is a need, especially in comparison to urban cities, like San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Portland. But in Los Angles, we get to make the first impression. You, know, if we can make a very cohesive argument, about the needs then we don’t have to make that work against their currant assumptions as much about environmentalism. Really, the upside to Los Angeles, is that there is so much space to work in, we are not at a loss. For urban forestry, in other major cities, they are running out of space to plant, or where to do rain water harvesting. In Los Angeles, we have a profound amount of space. As soon as you can someone to act, there is room to find actions that can be done.