2020 Awardee: Garfield 200 Tree Planting leaders- Joanna Repucci, Roberto Frietz, Andrew Raub

As part of the Sikh Tree Planting Committee in the Garfield Neighborhood, they were all integral parts in making sure the project was successful. The Sikh Community to celebrate 550 years of their faith, offered to donate trees to different neighborhoods in Phoenix. Garfield Neighborhood, a historically diverse neighborhood that struggles with tree equity and rising temperatures due to urban heat received 200 of these trees.

It was Andrew idea to modernize the effort by making a website from scratch, even paying the hosting and web costs from his own pocket. He made sure each page was also translated into Spanish to ensure that our Spanish Speaking Residents could also benefit from the project. He built the Google Forms and manages them as well. He talked to neighbors face to face and also posted on the Garfield Facebook page to encourage people to sign up. He did all this to make our neighborhood a cooler and greener place to live. Many of our neighbors and families are low income and can't afford to buy two trees to make their property more green. Making sure that the information was accessible and easy to understand helped ensure that our neighbors would be able to take part in this project.

As the City of Phoenix Neighborhood Specialist, Roberto helped the Garfield neighborhood organize a 200+ tree planting in October 2019 through a generous donation from the Phoenix Sikh community. Over the years he has helped the neighborhood with multiple attempts to improve our tree canopy. Roberto gathered a group of neighborhood leaders, pushed and pulled for the community to self-organize all while providing examples of best practices and support from the city. This project would not have been able to find over 100 households to accept being caretakers for these trees without his tremendous help. He continues to be the personification of how local government should work.

Joanna's passion for planting trees to help shade our city has carried our neighborhood through the last two tree plantings.  She has been one of the core volunteers and has led an effort in 2018 to get 50 trees planted, and for the 200-tree planting project.  She is in contact with organizations like Trees Matter, she brings materials from a diverse set of sources and keeps powering forward to get a great selection of trees in the ground.  Her knowledge and willingness to do what it takes to get things done is invaluable, and her energy unmatched.  She makes things happen, and in this case that's trees in the ground and a neighborhood educated with how to value and care for them. She thoroughly loves her experience as a tree planting leader; Garfield Trees is part of Joanna’s daily conversation.

2019 Awardee: Bonnie Richardson

Bonnie has a passion for trees and was the driving force to help City of Tempe establish a goal of increasing the tree canopy from 13.4 percent to 25 percent by 2040, nearly doubling City of Tempe’s shade. She pushed for a tree plan, with a significant component of the plan is education about the importance of trees and the proper selection to promote health and variety of species, planting, watering, and pruning of trees. Bonnie fosters collaboration to these goals with residents, businesses and organizations. She promotes the guiding principles of an Urban Forest in all her efforts, all aimed at cultivating collective action, expanding shade to maximize urban cooling, improve walkability evenly, use resources widely, enhance property values, promote a healthy community, enhance community beautification and livability and right tree, right place.