476,138 planted and 523,862 to go for MillionTreesNYC

With temperatures on the rise here in New York City and summer less than 3 weeks away, I’d like to highlight some of the spring photo shoots I’ve done for New York Restoration Project and the MillionTreesNYC initiative. MillionTreesNYC is a public-private partnership between New York Restoration Project and the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation through which one million new trees will be planted and cared for across NYC’s five boroughs by 2017. Only three and a half years after the program’s inception, they’re nearly halfway to their million trees goal!

On April 21, New York Restoration Project and City Year New York celebrated Earth Day along with corporate volunteers by planting trees in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York:

On April 28, in celebration of Arbor Day, New York Restoration Project, in partnership with the New York City Housing Authority, corporate sponsors, and eager 5th graders, planted 100 trees at the NYCHA Justice Sonia Sotomayor Houses in the Bronx:

After planting trees, students learned about exotic reptiles:

On May 13, New York Restoration Project, with the help of UBS volunteers and PS Q219 5th grade students, planted trees in the Kew Gardens Hills neighborhood in Queens:

For more photos from these events, check out the galleries on New York Restoration Project’s Facebook page:

• Earth Day Corporate Challenge with City Year
• UBS Volunteer Day

Luckily, the weather held up nicely for all three events, a nice improvement from the frigid temperatures at a tree-planting I photographed this past winter. Brrrrrr!