Doing Something
By Leslie Danoff, GFG Co-founder and Board Chair
If it weren’t for Donald Trump, Global Forest Generation would not exist. When he was elected President in November 2016, I was despondent, waking up with a leaden, sick, empty feeling. I’d lost my equilibrium and had a debilitating feeling of impending doom. I imagined myself digging a hole where I would wait out the next four years. While I’m not a put-my-head-in-a hole kind of person, my natural optimism had taken a hit.
I fought the despair and environmental depredations and other Trump travesties by immediately becoming an active resister. Seeking a new challenge worthy of this precarious moment, I was also on the cusp of becoming a grandmother, which filled me with joyful anticipation. Along with my elation and love for my first granddaughter, and the two who’ve been born since, is a deep sense of responsibility to help make the natural world the best it can be for their generation. I had no choice but to STEP IT UP and to continue to step it up. And not just as an antidote to Trump, as motivating as that is. It brings me to tears that the most pervasive and purposeful destruction of the natural world has occurred during my lifetime. The devastation is both measurable and beyond measure.
As native forests are critically important in so many ways, including as game changers in fighting climate change – and not nearly enough is happening quickly enough to save and to restore them – I set out to start a new nonprofit focusing on reforestation. This initial vision quickly evolved to encompass protecting forest ecosystems, particularly for water security, imperiled globally.
How did I make it out of the starting gate and well beyond? Eight years out of that gate, I’m hoping that by sharing my experience, I may encourage others. In a variety of meaningful ways, we CAN make a difference, individually and collectively.
I realized only in retrospect the effectiveness of my touchstones: Motivation, Inspiration, Imagination, Confidence, Humility, Energy, Perseverance – and Serendipity. The idea that evolved into Global Forest Generation came rather quickly. While I’d been involved in the nonprofit world and had played a pivotal role in radically rejuvenating another conservation nonprofit, I’d never started one. There were no guarantees that I’d succeed. But I did have the CONFIDENCE to try. I think it’s a necessity to believe that you’ll figure out how to do “this” – whatever “this” is. For me, HUMILITY was just as important. I’ve always been quick to speak up when I don’t know something, as that’s the quickest way to learn it. And I was certain that the worst thing wouldn’t be to fail. It would be failing to try.
Of course, I had to have a major MOTIVATION in order TO STEP IT UP AND DO SOMETHING! Mine was fueled, as I’ve described, by the most splendid life-affirming event – anticipating and then welcoming a grandchild into the world – along with what I considered to be a political catastrophe. While either experience could have provided sufficient motivation, the two together were – and continue to be – a most potent source of renewable ENERGY.
My drive TO DO SOMETHING happened at an age when many of my contemporaries had either retired or were considering retiring. I was 66. To my fellow Baby Boomers, I highly recommend the immense health benefits of immersing oneself in a cause that speaks to your spirit, fosters hope and can strengthen our shared sense of community. That sense of community can be nurtured locally or span national borders – or both, as demonstrated by what came to be Global Forest Generation’s first initiative.
But I’m getting ahead of myself! I could not yet imagine Acción Andina. But I did reimagine an event in 20th century American history. My INSPIRATION was President Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps. During the Depression, the CCC employed more than three million men (only men in those days) to regenerate decimated forests of the US. They were paid a dollar a day. It was such a small wage, yet it sustained millions of workers’ families as the men began to bring degraded land back to life. In less than 10 years – from 1933 to 1942 – three billion trees were planted. Many are the mature trees that fill our national forests. Roosevelt’s Tree Army is considered the single greatest conservation program in US history.
While it may be quixotic to think that a non-governmental entity can do what governments ought to be doing, that’s why many nonprofits exist: to try to fill the breach – and when and where possible, to involve governments. I wanted to apply my INSPIRATION from a past President to a present danger. I enVISIONed fighting global warming and poverty simultaneously by employing the world’s poorest people to regenerate the world’s most critical forests – often remote areas where people make a subsistence living.
I began to explore, WELCOMING THE UNKNOWN. It was a purposeful wandering in the desert – as I did have a map of sorts. It began to reveal itself in the form of SERENDIPITY. I credit serendipity for the most amazing things that have happened to me, including my pursuit of meaningful conservation activism. I wondered then and still do, to what extent do I and others create our own serendipity? Can you increase the odds of being the beneficiary of serendipity by being acutely attuned to possibilities? Once you focus on identifying and strengthening person-to-person contacts, creating a growing chain of connections (networking!), I believe it IS possible to greatly increase the odds: activating your antennae, making the most of an opportunity, an idea, a potential lead, even when it may be barely perceptible. At least, that’s been my experience, whether on the hunt for my first post-college job at CBS News, developing stories as a journalist, or figuring out how to DO SOMETHING new and challenging and meaningful.
During my period of connection and discovery, unlike being on a journalism deadline, I had the gift of time. I viewed each new conversation as an opportunity to learn, ask questions, listen intently, be challenged. Every day that I learned something, I considered a very good day, bringing me closer to discovering the committed people with whom to transform a VISION into a MISSION.
And then came my Eureka experience. It was early December 2017 when I met the inspiring Peruvian conservation leader, Constantino (Tino) Aucca. For almost two decades at that point, with his dedicated conservation team at his nonprofit Asociación Ecosistemas Andinos (ECOAN), Tino had been building trusting relationships with Indigenous peoples in remote communities. This trust resulted in their communal commitment to conservation – to regenerating their lost and degraded forests, which, in turn, benefitted their livelihoods.
With Tino as guide par excellence in Peru’s Vilcanota Mountains, I got to experience the dedication of the people and their multi-generational reforestation work parties. I got to experience their beautiful culture, their ancestral Inca principals of Ayni and Minka, the imperative to come together for the common good, to restore Pachamama, Mother Earth. I got to experience the joy expressed in their colorful clothes and ancient music and dance and symbolic offerings of thanks for Pachamama’s bounty before climbing the steep mountain passes to plant thousands of native Polylepis tree seedlings. Babies on mothers’ backs along with shawls filled with seedlings, fathers and grandfathers carrying the planting implements. Grandmothers weaving as they walked. Children holding hands.
I learned of Tino’s long-held dream to bring his proven model of community engagement with forest conservation to all seven of the Andean countries, across the length of South America to regenerate the critically important high-altitude Polylepis forests of the past. Having seen close-up what he and his team had accomplished, it wasn’t difficult to envision a restoration movement taking shape across a continent.
Another Eureka moment was a sudden certainty and clarity that elevating grassroots leadership had to be at the heart of what would become Global Forest Generation, as local leaders would be essential in motivating, mobilizing, and sustaining the potential of a multi-generational restoration movement. In the months following this trip, GFG would be co-founded with Tino and the two experienced conservationists who introduced me to Tino – George and Rita Fenwick, recently retired from their leadership of the American Bird Conservancy.
Back in the Vilcanota mountains of Peru, serendipity continued. At a meal following one of the Indigenous reforestation festivals, I sat next to a young man working for a “green” European search engine. He was scoping out potential tree-planting projects that his company might support. At the time, I marveled at the coincidence that this engaging person’s mother in France and my sister in New Jersey are both professional storytellers and how we’d immediately made that connection. But I had no idea how auspicious our encounter would prove to be. About eight months later, in the fall of 2018, this same young man, Florent Kaiser, would join the Co-founders as the first person on the GFG payroll and go on to become the CEO!
Fast forward to now – 2025. We have the same President again – and this time, far, far greater concerns – existential concerns for the survival of our country founded on the principles of the rule of law and freedom from the vengeful, corrupt tyranny of a king. Existential concerns about an autocrat committed to destroying sacred things, whether democratic norms or the natural world. These unprecedented, dangerous times require us more than ever to DO SOMETHING. GFG was born from the belief that hope is an action, not a feeling, and that restoring our forests and our faith in the future go hand in hand. HOPE requires maintaining our individual and collective MOTIVATION and PERSEVERANCE, our RESISTANCE. And to IMAGINE the spirit of Jane Goodall urging us on, reminding us that “every single day you live, you make a difference in the world. And you get to choose what kind of difference you make.”
