Post News Network
Bhubaneswar: Bakul Foundation launched the 10th year of ‘My Tree’ campaign with ambitious plans and announcements at an event held at the Bakul Library in Satyanagar Sunday.
About 100 volunteers of Bakul and people who have been part of the campaign were present at the event. Among those who attended it were MLAs Priyadarshi Mishra and Akash Das Nayak, cultural icons such as dancers Aruna Mohanty and Ileana Citaristi, eminent people from the entertainment industry like Usasi Mishra, Harihar Dash, Basanta Sahoo, Shagoon Satpathy, Amrita Panda and Sulagna Routray, sports icons like Padmini Rout, entrepreneurs Dibyalok Patnaik, Sarad Baid, Vineet Gupta and leaders from the social sector such as Abha Mishra and Alka Gupta.
Sujit Mahapatra reminisced about the origins of the campaign in 2009 when volunteers felt strongly about the trees being cut down and wanted to do something about saving them. But the challenge was what these ordinary volunteers could do with minimal resources. There was also the painful realization that lots of trees were getting planted but also getting aborted because there was little care after the plantation. Moreover, calls for planting trees and saving the planet had become clichéd and did not have much impact.
That’s why the volunteers of Bakul have thought of promoting planting and gifting trees as a cultural practice, where it becomes a part of everyday life of people. Therefore, My Tree campaign, which as the name suggests, aims at establishing a personal relationship with plants that happens when one plants or gifts trees on occasions such as child birth, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, etc.
The campaign has other innovative elements both in social media and in outreach activities such as celebration of fake birthdays in which volunteers while hanging out with friends in cafes, hotels celebrate someone’s fake birthday by doing a little drama and wishing Happy Birthday and gifting a plant so that all others in the café notice that a tree was gifted at a birthday celebration.
Similarly, volunteers have gone out on roadshows on bullock carts gifting trees. The sight of young volunteers on a bullock cart in the city attracts attention and the volunteers use it as an excuse to talk to people about gifting plants.