Update: Thanks to the generosity of Wikipedia donors, we were able to meet our goal of planting 400,000 trees! If you have not yet given to Wikipedia and are able to, we are grateful for your support. Visit donate.wikimedia.org to make a contribution.
Timed with our 2020 end-of-year fundraising campaign on English Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation is excited to announce a new collaboration with Plant Your Change to support the planting of 400,000 trees.
For every donation of US$1 or more made to the Wikimedia Foundation during this collaboration, Plant Your Change — an initiative to plant at least 100 million trees in the next decade — will plant a tree to protect the environment.
“We are thrilled to partner with Plant Your Change to increase the impact of donors’ gifts,” said Lisa Gruwell, Chief Advancement Officer for the Wikimedia Foundation. “When you give to Wikimedia right now, Plant Your Change will add a tree to the Earth, helping to reduce the effects of carbon dioxide emissions while also beautifying the world. Wikipedia benefits. The planet benefits. We all benefit.”
The Wikimedia Foundation has made it a priority to become more environmentally sustainable and conscious of our environmental impact while we work to make free knowledge available to every human being.
“We are deeply passionate about environmental sustainability and reducing the effects of climate change to ensure that the sum of all human knowledge continues to be available, regardless of political and global realities,” said Janeen Uzzell, Chief Operating Officer for the Wikimedia Foundation.
For the past two years, the Wikimedia Foundation has released a sustainability statement, chronicling the total annual carbon footprint of our work and informing recommendations to meaningfully reduce future carbon impacts. The Foundation also collaborates with volunteer-led efforts, including the Wikimedia Sustainability Initiative aimed at reducing the environmental impact of the Wikimedia projects.
The trees planted through the collaboration with Plant Your Change will help contribute to the Foundation’s sustainability efforts. The Foundation considers sustainability as a critical part of our decisions around how we plan our operations, travel, physical office use, and major events.
“Wikipedia is an important source for reliable information about climate change. Although we operate on such a small budget for running one of the world’s most popular websites, we must do our part and also reduce our own emissions. In addition to that, planting trees is an important strategy to mitigate climate change – just check out the ‘reforestation‘ article on Wikipedia!,” said Lukas Mezger, Wikimedia volunteer and one of the creators of the Wikimedia Sustainability Initiative.
The Wikimedia Foundation’s annual end-of-year fundraising campaign on English Wikipedia is happening now. As the world’s only major website run by a nonprofit organization, Wikipedia is largely supported by its readers, with most donations around US$15.
In this season of giving, we hope you will consider making a donation to Wikipedia to ensure it continues to thrive and remain independent for years to come. Thank you for thinking of Wikipedia and its connection to the much wider world we live in.
About Plant Your Change
Plant Your Change is committed to fighting climate change by planting trees to increase the impact of people’s everyday purchases. Anyone with a credit or debit card can sign up to plant trees when they use their card. You can learn more at plantyourchange.com.
About the Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation is the international non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge freely. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive.
