By Alfredo, Deivid and the Iracambi team | The Iracambi tree planters
Dear donors,
I hope you are doing well, and we want to send you all a big thank you for your support of our programs and take you backstage and show you a little of the nuts and bolts of our reforestry program!
You’re probably already familiar with our frontline activities - Alfredo and his team visiting the farms, checking on the baby trees, weeding and strimming the grass that threatens to choke them, or giving them a dose of fertilizer to help them face the end of the rainy season.
Plus what Deivid is up to in the nursery – making new seedling tables, filling the bags with the perfect mixture of soil and compost, germinating the seeds he has collected in the forest, watering the seedlings, and checking on the ten community nurseries – whose owners are inordinately proud of them!
In this letter, we´d like to give you an idea of how we are using your donations – for which we are extremely grateful!
First, let us explain that the biggest project expense is labor. Land preparation, planting and maintenance requires lots of hard work and sweat equity, and everyone who works with us comes from the local community so your donations, as well as helping us reforest, are providing plenty of employment!
And, even better, our peak season will begin in August when we start visiting the planting sites and doing the preliminary clearing and hole digging. This coincides nicely with the end of the coffee harvest, when local farmers will be glad of extra employment. Another important point is that in our annual reforestry budgeting we include labor costs for two years, since every tree planted will require two years maintenance.
In the first quarter of this year we received in GlobalGiving donations a total of R$255,315 or USD$48, 533. Total project expenses were R$43,000 or USD 8,174. This left us with a quarterly balance of USD$40,359. Project expenses will increase from July when we shall be hiring a second project manager, and even more sharply from August when we shall be using casual labor to start preparing for the planting season.
One of our main upcoming expenses will be acquiring a suitable used vehicle to transport equipment and people. Up to now we`ve been using whatever transport is available, but we really need to have a pickup truck. Vehicles in Brazil are expensive, and we estimate this will cost us around $15,000. So we are budgeting carefully to ensure that funds will be available at the right time!
So, dear donors, thank you for coming backstage with us, and thank you even more for your generous support. We`re on a long term commitment together, caring for the trees you have helped us plant, making seedlings to plant later in the year, and planning for the future.
As the Chinese proverb says, "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."
Be safe, friends, and we´ll talk again soon,
with love from Alredo, Deivid and the Iracambi team
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