Taking an Early Stand for the Sake of Trees : Tara Church turned a simple Brownie project into a national youth program.
Looking back on her life, Tara Church can pinpoint “the defining moment, the single most empowering experience” of her 21 years. She was 8 and in a Brownie troop that decided to help the environment by planting a tree.
“I distinctly remember feeling for the first time that my actions could make a difference in the world,” Church said from the El Segundo office where she directs Tree Musketeers--the group she founded with her Brownie troop years ago.
Church is also a Phi Beta Kappa senior at USC. She talks with the authority of a CEO and has a resume to match--one that starts with a mission statement (“to create a meaningful change for the environment . . .”) and ends with a list of 22 honors and awards. In April, she will attend a White House ceremony to honor the planting of her now national organization’s 1-millionth tree, which will grow in the president’s front yard.
Tara’s mother, Gail Church, said she thought this tree-hugging business would be just a phase, that her daughter would “pass through it quickly and go on to something else.” After all, that’s what most 8-year-olds do.
But that’s the amazing thing about being a parent. You never know until many years down the line which of your efforts will take root, so to speak.
The Church family’s case is an extreme example. It began when Tara and her troop mates were planning for a camp-out during a severe drought, said mother Gail, who was a troop leader then. “The Girl Scout Council was recommending we use disposable plates on camp-outs, so the kids wouldn’t use water to wash dishes.”
But Gail Church said her leadership style wasn’t to just tell the kids what to do. Her method was to inform and then discuss, so they would have an understanding of the issues. At a meeting to plan the trip, she explained about the drought. Then she gave the kids options: Paper plates would use up trees in the forest, but the regular plates would use up precious water. Which did they want?
“What’s wrong with using up trees?” the kids asked.
Here’s what daughter Tara remembers vividly.
“We were sitting in a little circle, 13 of us, debating whether to use paper or the tin dishes we usually use. My mother threw in the little thought that trees are used to make paper, and they were also a scarce resource. Then she told us about all the good things that trees do for the environment. This led to a whole discussion about deforestation, and the landfill crisis, and soil erosion--things we had never heard about before.
“It was 1987, and my mom told us she had read that scientists were trying to find ways to live underground in case humans totally pollute the atmosphere, and there’s a huge hole in the ozone layer . . . or something to that effect. Mind you, we’ve never confirmed that such research was actually being done, but the thought for us little kids that we might spend our lives underneath the earth was really terrifying. . . . Our little faces dropped. I distinctly remember one little girl asking, ‘Can you play soccer underground?’ ”
The kids decided unanimously to use tin plates to save the trees. And they decided to do something about the environmental problems that they and others were helping to create. They wanted to plant a tree.
The whole Brownie troop went to a local nursery, which offered to donate the tree of the troop’s choice. The troop picked a sycamore, named her Marcie the Marvelous Tree, and got permission to plant her on public property, on Imperial Avenue in El Segundo, as the start of what eventually would become a pollution barrier between the city and nearby Los Angeles International Airport.
Church recalls that after the planting “we all sat on the ground around Marcie and talked and thought about how much good this one little tree could do for the environment and for us as we grew up.”
That was “the defining moment” she described above--the split-second when, as a child, she said she realized that one individual could actually make a difference in the world.
Of course, at the time it was happening, neither she nor her mother knew it was a revelation so monumental.
That was just the beginning. The troop watched Marcie grow and wanted to plant more trees like her. A Brownie named Alisa Wise (now a senior at the University of San Francisco) proposed they give themselves the name of Tree Musketeers. With the troop leaders’ help, they kept on planting and planning, and then one leader explained to them about a little-celebrated holiday called Arbor Day.
“That holiday hadn’t been observed in our area for years, so we went to the El Segundo City Council and asked them to proclaim March 7 as Arbor Day on the local calendar,” Church said. She added that “starting in 1988, we have held Arbor Day celebrations ever since, and they have come to be major community events.”
Then the troop asked the Girl Scouts to put Arbor Day back on its national calendar, too. And it was done.
Soon the kids were poring over city plans, deciding to plant trees in residential areas and to enlist the help of other kids from local clubs, schools and community groups.
“We were really excited about all this,” Gail Church recalled, and the kids’ enthusiasm went over the top when the entire troop was invited to Washington, D.C., in 1988 to accept the national President’s Environmental Youth Award.
Tara Church said that was “another defining moment for all of us. It was a kind of external validation of the importance of our work. We came back from Washington and decided to publicize the importance of conservation issues, such as trees, by writing articles for the local paper and doing other things.”
By 1990, the girls were 11 years old, and the project was growing too big and too fast to remain a Girl Scout activity.
“We needed it to be a separate entity,” Church said.
The Tree Musketeers became a nonprofit group in 1990.
By 1992, which Church calls “a watershed year,” the group moved into office space in El Segundo (the office had at first been in the Church home) and became a national organization--the first environmental group started and run by kids. They started recruiting local boys and girls to join, and began planning national youth summit conferences. Besides Church, other founding Brownies remained involved--Sabrina Alimahomed, Gina Barrett, Brande Bryant, Amber Donahue, Shannon Garton, Tamara Garton, Lori Isais, Crystal Jones, Michelle Li, April Nemeth, Kelli Sumrow and Alisa Wise.
They spoke at conferences around the country and continued their conservation activities, Church said. In 1994, the Tree Musketeers won the President’s Volunteer Action Award, which President Clinton presented to them in the White House Rose Garden.
In 1995 and 1996, the original founders realized they were “getting old,” and according to the bylaws, could not be regular members of the group after they graduated from high school. They had already launched the city’s first recycling program, at first with a drop-off center and then with a curbside recycling service.
“We knew there needed to be a well-trained next generation to take over our work, “ Church said. So in 1996, she and Musketeer Tammy Smith, both 17, put together a program to train middle-school children in leadership skills, environmental-activity planning and in keeping the Tree Musketeers going at full tilt. They publicized the program in schools and in news releases to local papers, and the new generation came flooding in, she said.
Of course, Church would go to college. But her dilemma was where. Many members of the original group were leaving town--but she felt entrenched in her environmental activities and hated to move away, she said. “It so happens that USC offered me a ton of scholarship money, so I was able to stay nearby.”
Now a senior, she lives in Hancock Park, spends two days a week at USC, and works three full days (and some weekends) at Tree Musketeers, she said. She writes grant proposals, does public speaking to recruit new members and raise funds, trains newcomers, and, of course, plants trees. Marcie the Marvelous Tree is 50 feet tall now and in good health, Church said.
The group’s newest program, the national One in a Million Campaign--to empower 1 million kids to donate one hour to planting 1 million trees by the end of 2000--is already a huge success, with the millionth tree slated to grow on the White House lawn.
