Education Today Education Today Magazine
TG Escapes, providers of modular eco buildings to the UK education sector, have launched a tree planting scheme for their school customers partnering with EcoMatcher. The project has three aims, which should resonate strongly as the threat of climate change looms ever closer:
• To engage students in the challenges facing the planet and increase their awareness of the need for sustainable living
• To help support schools in their Rights Respecting Schools agenda by supporting farmers and their families in Uganda
• To offset a proportion of a school’s carbon emissions – each tree will absorb 250Kg of CO2 over its lifetime
EcoMatcher works closely with tree planting organisations who have been selected and vetted with great care, located in five countries interspersed around the equator. Each country in which EcoMatcher operates is bearing the geographic and socio-economic trauma inflicted upon local communities by intensive deforestation.
TG Escapes has chosen to adopt and gift trees in Uganda, where the deforestation has occurred both recently and rampantly: if it continues at its current rate, there will be no forest left in just 40 years. The local partner is TAU (Tree Adoption Uganda) which is youth led and aimed at tackling both the issues of climate change and youth unemployment.
Established by 27 year old social entrepreneur and founder Charles Batte, TAU works to mitigate the environmental impact of deforestation while simultaneously alleviating poverty in local communities and promoting socio-economic growth. 2500 young people have already been trained in environmental conservation and are now skilled in all aspects of tree planting such as grafting, propagating and pruning whilst also managing interactions with humans and nature. They are all primed and ready to plant and nurture their own piece of forest.
TG Escapes is gifting trees on behalf of all future customers. For every school that receives a free proposal for a new classroom, the company will fund the planting of 10 trees which will then be gifted to the school along with a free Tree Pack. The Tree Pack contains lesson plans, posters, videos and badges designed to help educate students about the importance of sustainability. For each finished building, they will pay for TAU to plant a ‘forest’ of between 200 and 1000 trees (depending upon the size of the school) which will again be gifted.
Each tree that is planted under the EcoMatcher scheme is recorded by an app which logs the location and date of planting and includes a picture of both the tree and the farmer taking care of it. Once a school has become the custodian of some trees, the students will be able to virtually travel to them using TreeTracker, a web application utilising amazing satellite maps, allowing the children to see the trees and even ‘chat’ to them.
We all need some hope, and TG Escapes sincerely hope that their exciting new project will provide just that for British students and for all those living in the communities set to benefit from the trees.
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TG Escapes design, manufacture and build bespoke eco buildings for schools using offsite modular construction. They have over 200 buildings in education throughout the UK featuring classrooms, staff rooms, training centres, studios, chapels, sports pavilions, canteens, nurseries SEND spaces and outdoor classrooms. Customers have rated them 4.9 out of 5 based on 141 reviews.