Tress for Streets – a case study

How we turned an aspiration for more tree-lined streets into a national initiative

Back in 2018, Simeon Linstead, the founder of Start with Local, had a chance encounter with a tree enthusiast at a local park volunteer event. After a short conversation he discovered that the man had an aspiration to get more trees planted in his neighbourhood’s streets – but felt frustrated with the many barriers. That struck a chord. Fast forward six years, and we’ve successfully delivered Trees for Streets – the national street tree sponsorship scheme. This initiative now supports residents and councils in towns and cities across the UK, planting thousands of new street trees. But how do you turn a seed of an idea into reality?

Greener streets and empowered communities

We are very interested in both street greening, and empowering individuals and communities to make it happen.

Our streets, towns and cities need to become far greener. Tree-lined streets support our mental and physical well-being and enhance the local environment. There are huge benefits to planting more street trees, from reducing flooding, providing cooling in summer, to encouraging people to walk more.

At Start with Local, we believe in empowering individuals and communities to effect change in their immediate local world. Planting a tree can be the first step on the road to taking on a more active role in your community. So we wanted to make it really easy.

Sponsorship

Tree sponsorship was nothing new. We’d seen plenty of examples of schemes, from plant a tree in ’73 to numerous local council initiatives. In the main, most of these failed to deliver at scale or weren’t long lasting. We knew there was a latent demand from the public to donate towards tree planting, and that if communicated effectively we were confident that we could take street tree sponsorship on to a new level.

Street trees are very expensive, but so is setting up a national scheme

Street trees are expensive to plant and establish, costing an average of £800-£1,000 per tree.

But before we could set about offering tree sponsorship to the public, we had to raise funding for the project. We adopted a collaborative approach and set up a joint endeavour with the national charity, Trees for Cities. This partnership allowed us to apply for grant funding. Start with Local wrote funding bids, which were channelled through the charity. The project received initial funding from the City of London (City Bridge Foundation) and a major award from DefRA (Green Recovery Challenge Fund), managed by the National Lottery Heritage Lottery Fund. Working with a charity partner provided the project with grant management expertise. Further funds came from the Mayor of London as part of a city-wide tree planting initiative  – Trees for London (and our role within the London Urban Forest Plan). The charity itself also generously underwrote the project.

More than just sponsorship

Trees for Streets was established to bring different types of funding into the street tree space. We aimed to create a commercially sustainable model, reducing over-reliance on grant funding.

We built a fundraising platform that supported individual donations for trees, crowdfunding, major donations, corporate involvement and grants.

We also created significant cost savings by encouraging residents to pledge to water their trees, typically saved £400 per tree. Later, we developed a street tree watering platform to help councils engage residents in supplemental watering – Watering Champions.

Working with local authorities

There were barriers to securing good levels of sponsorship, but we overcame them. Firstly, we had to get lots of local authorities on board. They can be cautious, slow-moving, and composed of stakeholders with differing agendas. We leveraged our commercial business development mindset to rapidly recruit 25 local authorities, including a third of London boroughs, Bristol, Coventry, Cambridge, and Sheffield.

A digital platform

A digital platform allowed the project to scale. We created the flexibility to support the scheme in various settings. With limited resources, we adopted an agile approach, developing what we needed as we went along. We enhanced efficiency, user experience, and product offerings using off-the-shelf packages combined with our proprietary tree management system.

Raising public awareness

Taking Trees for Streets to market involved developing a unique marketing program. We developed a bold brand identity and honed our best practices in each channel. For example, we worked out a super-efficient way to deliver door-drops to individuals without a tree outside their homes. This became our biggest channel. We took a bold approach to social media, focusing on X.com, where we became the most engaged account in our sector.

Working with a charity partner

Our intention was to deliver a successful project that could be integrated seamlessly into our partner organization – Trees for Cities. Four years after its launch, we achieved this ambition. We fully transitioned the project into the charity’s management structure. Trees for Cities, a mid-size charity, can now further assert itself in the urban tree space and take advantage of the synergies with its other successful programmes resulting from the full ownership of this major national scheme.

Lessons learned

The main one, is just get on and do it. Resources are tight, so be agile, and only develop what you actually need. Constantly refine your own best practices – your own way of doing things. Incubate your project – don’t allow the it to become absorbed into a larger corporate structure too soon, otherwise you lose focus, increase costs, and dilute the responsibility for outcomes/performance. Put in the hours – there’s no avoiding that starting anything up is going to be tough. You need leadership that understands all the aspects of the operation and isn’t afraid to muck in. You get it right when you get the detail right. Be present.

Working with local authorities

We found that working with councils is challenging, but we turned this into a core competency. As a purpose-driven organization, solving problems with local authorities helped address broader issues, such as barriers to tree planting.

Trees for Streets has created a low-cost channel for councils to fund street tree planting. It would be nearly impossible for a local authority to develop the necessary technology or dedicated marketing and engagement programs independently. Local authorities need partnerships to achieve their aims and must treat partners as equals to ensure the sustainability of these arrangements, particularly when the partner’s goal is not to extract profit.

One very successful partnership was with Haringey Council (see photo) – over a thousand trees were sponsored within 4 seasons. This was a fantastic coming together of officers, councillors, residents, local businesses, and Trees for Streets.

Start with Local

We aim to help local authorities work more effectively with their communities; support charities and NGOs pursue their missions; and businesses to work in harmony within their localities.

We are a creative, design and delivery project agency – we make things happen. We love bringing things together: technology, purpose, sustainable commercial models, design, being agile, pragmatic, and injecting positive energy into all we’re involved with.

If your organization would like to have a chat about how we went about making Trees for Streets happen, or you’d like to work with us on a project, need help designing a new service, or how we can help you work more local, please drop us a line – Simeon@startwithlocal.org.uk