40 Years of Earth Day, 20 Consecutive Earth Fairs of Success

by Corbyn

Last Tuesday I blogged about the excitement of the coming event at Balboa Park for Earth Day. Well, I've got some great news! Our 20th year at the Balboa Park Earth Fair was the most successful year yet... BY FAR! The event boasted 65,000 people who attended this year, hundreds upon hundreds of whom came by the Plant With Purpose booth to interact with any one of our 15 awesome volunteers. Hundreds came to learn just what Plant With Purpose is all about and each one learned about this great local organization that has been preaching and practicing sustainable living and community development for 25 years! What a great venue for Plant With Purpose to reach out to so many with the message of our international work. People were wonderfully receptive to our message and were really energized to plant a tree for a buck, buy a t-shirt or a bag of coffee, or slap an awesome 'Plant Hope' removable tattoo on their kids or significant others!

We raised $2,000 dollars, which is well over double what we raised last year, and we also had a great article in the Earth Times magazine, of which 25,000 issues were distributed! As we told booth visitors that Plant With Purpose is going to plant over 1 million trees in the six countries we work, we asked people to donate $1 to plant 1 tree, or $5 to plant five trees and so on. Over 350 trees were purchased and many more people left our booth with a feeling of involvement in our reforestation efforts! We even had a few of the girls from the San Diego Roller Derby (who just raised over $350 at their last 'bout' for us) come volunteer, helping us draw crowds and sell trees! Here are a few pictures from the event!