Planting fruit trees for Guatemalan families

Throughout schoolyards and family homes along the Rio Dulce River in Eastern Guatemala, fruit trees are quietly growing.

The trees were lovingly and carefully planted over the years since 2015 with the aim of providing nutritional, economic, social, and environmental benefits to vulnerable children and low-income families in the area. Hundreds of trees - including breadfruit, mango, citrus, durian, mangosteen, jaboticaba, guava, sapote, rollinea, and carambola, among others - are reaching the age where the trees are beginning to produce fruit that will feed and nourish their community.

There have been challenges along the way, including a changing climate and a global pandemic that impacted the trees and our project. A series of uncommonly strong storms and floods damaged or wiped out many of our earliest planted trees, while the pandemic prevented our team from traveling to Guatemala in 2020. 

However, we returned in 2021 and 2022 to replant the lost trees as well as hundreds of new ones so that communities and orchards could recover. Now in 2023, we are fundraising to return next year to plant even more and to conduct aftercare and data collection on those from previous years.

If you have the ability, we would be very grateful for a contribution to this project so we can spread the many benefits of fruit trees to a deeply vulnerable community and region on the front lines of climate change and poverty.

Every donation matters, just as every tree matters - with just one tree able to produce over 150 pounds of food per year!

To a fruitful future for Guatemala,

The FTPF Team