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By Canopy Team on August 15, 2024
JP (second to right) and the Canopy community at the 2023 Tree Awards and Volunteer Party
Dear friends,
Today marks my one-year anniversary since joining Canopy as its Executive Director. It has been a transformative year, learning from a talented team that works every day to plant trees and inspire diverse communities to champion and care for their urban forest. It’s been an emotional year, listening and learning from people about the work Canopy has accomplished so far, and the work that lies ahead. And it’s been an inspiring year, as we dream of Canopy’s next chapter.
Canopy is more than just an organization; it is a community movement made up of the very people we aim to power – working in partnership towards a more equitable, sustainable, and rewarding green future.
Together, we can write the next chapter for Canopy – one where we create invested communities through planting more trees, greening more neighborhoods, listening and engaging more people, being present in more schools, and providing meaningful job skills that uplift individuals and their communities.
In the coming year, Canopy will take a look at our mission, vision and strategic plan with a new lens so that we can align with the realities of the communities we work in and the changed climate we live in. We believe that everyone who wants a tree deserves the right to have one. Everyone who wants to plant a tree deserves the right to plant one. Everyone who wants to eat fresh, healthy fruit from a tree deserves the right to that joy. And everyone waiting for the bus or walking down the street deserves to do so under the shade of a healthy tree.
This past year, we’ve encouraged our team to find joy in our work and lean on each other in difficult times. As I’ve shared with the Canopy team, this is emotional, and it is personal. We all have a reason for being here.
For me, the journey to this work began growing up in the University Lakes Mobile Home Park, in an unincorporated neighborhood of Miami where no one has ever taken the time to even give it a name. Much like some of the communities Canopy works in, there was constant flooding and few trees to protect us from the sun and the heat. And as I think back to my late mother, who would wait for the bus under the scorching Miami sun to take her to her job at the Varadero Supermarket, I hope I’ve made her proud in the path she inspired me to pursue.
We’re committed because it’s personal. Now, we are resolved to push forward and do more.
I invite you all to join us in this movement and help us write this next chapter. Together, we can create a better future for this generation and the ones to come. Together, we can ensure that everyone has the right to greener, healthier lives.
In community,
JP Renaud
Executive Director
