Valley Permaculture Alliance (VPA)

Our Shade Tree Program provides shade tree education and distribution for local utility companies, Salt River Project, SRP and Mesa Electric, in Arizona. Working with SRP, we help implement a valley wide program that teaches thousands of residents how to plant trees strategically to reduce their air conditioning use while adding trees to the landscape. Residents are provided education on tree placement, planting, maintenance and are given 5 gallon trees to take home and plant. This year with SRP we distributed approximately thousands of trees and educated thousands of residents. We launched the City of Mesa Electric program in Spring 2024 and will continue to grow that program in the next few years.

Park Rx is a program that we supported as a financial sponsor so that parks in high need areas are activited with a variety of areas so people can enjoy activities in parks and around trees. The Urban Food Forest program is mostly education based with some planting of food bearing trees in schools. Our goal is for community members to value trees through the function of food through this program. We have a recipe book and an annual event around a local tree that provides pancakes made from flour from the pods on the tree. This encourages people to embrace native trees and reevaluation the way the value the pods that fall from the tree.