Trees Atlanta: The Nonprofit Behind the City's Tree Plantings
Most of the trees lining Atlanta's medians, greenways, and Beltline corridors didn't get there by accident. A single nonprofit, run largely on volunteer labor, has been planting and defending the city's canopy since the 1980s.
Published July 6, 2026Trees Atlanta was founded in the mid-1980s in response to a wave of tree loss from development and storm damage, at a time when the city's canopy was shrinking fast enough to alarm residents who had grown up under it. The organization's founding premise was straightforward: if the city wasn't going to replant fast enough on its own, a citizen group could raise the money, source the trees, and put volunteer labor into planting and early-years maintenance instead of waiting on municipal budgets.
How planting actually happens
A tree going into a median or a street right-of-way isn't just dropped in the ground and left. Trees Atlanta's model relies on organized volunteer planting days, where crews under staff supervision dig, plant, mulch, and stake new trees in a single coordinated effort, followed by a multi-year watering and monitoring commitment that's arguably more important than the planting itself — a young tree's first two or three summers determine whether it survives to maturity, and volunteer watering crews cover a lot of that gap in neighborhoods where city watering budgets don't reach every new tree.
The TreeKeepers program
Beyond planting, the organization runs a citizen-forester training program that teaches volunteers the basics of tree biology, pruning, and diagnosis, turning ordinary residents into people capable of doing basic tree care and advocacy in their own neighborhoods. Graduates of that kind of program often become the volunteers who organize plantings on their own streets or advocate for tree protection when a nearby development threatens mature trees — a multiplier effect that extends the group's reach well past what its own paid staff could cover alone.
The nursery and arboretum
Trees Atlanta grows a meaningful share of its own planting stock at a nursery it operates near its headquarters in the Old Fourth Ward, which doubles as a small public arboretum and native plant demonstration garden open to visitors. Growing trees in-house rather than buying them all from commercial suppliers gives the organization more control over species selection, letting it favor natives and cultivars suited to Atlanta's specific soil and climate conditions over whatever happens to be available and cheap at a big commercial nursery.
Working alongside city agencies, not replacing them
It's worth being clear that Trees Atlanta doesn't substitute for the city's own forestry management — the two operate alongside each other, with the nonprofit filling gaps in planting capacity and public engagement that municipal budgets and staffing can't always cover. That distinction matters when comparing this organization's work to the policy side covered in how the city manages its urban forest: one is a government function with permitting authority, the other is a nonprofit doing the labor-intensive work of actually getting trees in the ground and keeping them alive.
How the canopy-loss numbers connect to this work
Atlanta's ongoing struggle with canopy loss, covered in more detail elsewhere on this site, is the backdrop that makes an organization like this necessary in the first place — planting alone can't outpace loss if removal rates from development and storms stay high, but it's one of the only tools available for actively adding canopy rather than just slowing its decline. Volunteers interested in getting involved can typically start with a single planting day with no prior experience required, then work up to more specialized training if they want a longer-term role.
Species selection and why it matters long term
Choosing what to plant isn't just an aesthetic decision — species selection determines how a street tree performs decades later, whether it tolerates compacted urban soil and drought stress, whether its root system damages nearby sidewalks and utilities, and whether it's resilient against the pests and diseases that have wiped out entire tree populations elsewhere in the country. Trees Atlanta's staff arborists weigh those long-term factors against a neighborhood's preferences and site constraints, favoring diversity across a planting to avoid the kind of single-species monoculture that made cities vulnerable when Dutch elm disease and emerald ash borer swept through other regions.
Funding a volunteer-powered nonprofit
Running plantings, a nursery, and training programs at this scale takes real money, and the organization relies on a mix of individual donations, corporate sponsorships, and grant funding rather than any guaranteed public appropriation. That funding model means the pace of new plantings in a given year tracks fundraising success as much as neighborhood demand, and it's part of why the organization actively courts both small individual donors and larger corporate partners rather than depending on any single funding source that could disappear in a bad year.