From Stephan Lewis

It was a great weekend to walk through the neighborhood getting our hands dirty with Friends of Trees this past Saturday, 2/21. Friends of Trees has sent on a big thank you to the 107IST for helping them find happy homes for 325 trees between the Portland and Vancouver plantings with our Portland contingent spanning 6 crews. They use us as an example of how groups can help out when they need volunteers and, once again, we didn't let them down.

While it’s always great to see some of the usual suspects out volunteering, it was really nice to see some familiar faces that don’t typically join us for these types of events. Maybe we should warn people that this type of work is addictive as there were guarantees made about seeing them at future events. Feel free to blame Kyle.

University of Portland students made up the other large group of volunteers, and even though they had more trained crew leaders than we did, our seasoned FoT volunteers are clearly better at planting trees. Those of you that attended the AGM may remember the high density of our members in this area of North Portland. As a result, this may be the largest number of 107IST members that have ever walked to this type of event. It was awesome. The U of P kids seemed nice and all, but we may need to do this one again just to prove our superiority.