Help Support and Grow the Green World Campaign

Twenty years ago, author Marc Barasch decided to turn the principles in his popular book The Compassionate Life into action by founding the Green World Campaign (GWC).

This GoFundMe project aims to provide resources for organizational development to build on GWC's impressive successes and their pioneering leadership in promoting regenerative culture worldwide.

Marc and GWC have now worked in 10 countries on three continents to help restore degraded landscapes and struggling communities on the front lines of climate change. They have focused their efforts in Kenya, working mostly pro bono in collaboration with indigenous partners in a hundred communities. Their unique holistic model, “The Regenerative Society,” is now rapidly spreading.

This “storymap” is a great overview of GWC’s award-winning achievements in Kenya during over a decade of largely volunteer work. Its eco-social approach is being cited as a model for a major shift to regenerative practices for that country, for the continent, and potentially for the world. This GoFundMe project aims to provide the resources needed to support and grow the staff and organizational structure to meet large-scale opportunities at the intersection of climate, food security, biodiversity, and human thriving.

In more detail:

In a region of deep poverty and arid land, the Green World Campaign has planted millions of trees and restored thousands of acres. It has trained tens of thousands of smallholder farmers in agro-forestry methods that increase healthy, carbon-storing soil and nutrient-rich native crops. It has taught hundreds of thousands of students to be hands-on eco-citizens, transforming their schools into “action learning centers.” It has started programs for the health and empowerment of women and girls, and worked with tribal elders to restore sacred forests, enabling them to preserve their heritage and propagate their bio-cultural practices. It has helped start nature-based small enterprises for community income and the country’s first localized “eco-currency.”

The GWC has also used arts and music, media and technology to promote regenerative culture and effective regreening. Marc's professional background has helped him to publicize the cause on National Public Radio and in other major media. He conceived and co-produced “Text TREE”, an award-winning interactive installation on Times Square Jumbotrons that attracted global attention. With teams from Kenya to Silicon Valley, Marc is leading development of a novel tech platform called AIRS (Automated Incentives for Regenerative Stewardship) that combines “ground-truthing” with satellite remote sensing and AI to monitor, evaluate, and finance restoration of landscapes and communities.

GWC’s "outcome metrics" exceed those of much larger, better funded, better-known nonprofits, but astonishingly, they are achieved for under $100,000/year including all programs, staff, and infrastructure. We friends and supporters of this GoFundMe project have observed these fiercely dedicated efforts for many years. We know well the sacrifice it has required of Marc, his African colleagues, and a network of volunteers to sustain these exemplary programs on such scant funding. Now is the time to support GWC’s stable, healthy organizational growth.

Today, GWC and its Regenerative Society movement is poised to scale up ten or even a hundred times, "flipping the script" to empower some of the planet’s poorest people to become leaders in restoring a thriving planetary ecosystem now and for the generations to come.

Please help us strengthen this organization so it can sustain and expand its amazing programs that are already helping so many. Your funding will allow it to build organizational capacity and provide for succession planning. Your support will enable GWC to fulfill its original statement of purpose—to “ReGreen the World”--at a time when the Earth’s very life-support systems are imperiled. And it will put into robust practice an ancient piece of wisdom: “Compassion is planting a tree under whose shade your children may sit.”