Alvarez Spark Innovation Award recipient Maxwell Landy used grant money to kickstart his ed-tech nonprofit Plant the Peace to investigate ways to make fighting climate change more inclusive. Maxwell is majoring in environmental studies with minors in public policy and business management.”

Plant the Peace is a nonprofit social entrepreneurship venture founded in April 2019 fighting climate change at the cross-section of carbon reduction and educational technology. For every 10 questions a user correctly answers, the nonprofit will donate one tree to Sub-Saharan Africa. Through the Victor C. Alvarez Spark Innovation Award from the Phyllis M. Taylor Center, the organization received the funding needed to build a website, develop three games, and design a system that allows users to create accounts to track their number of trees planted.

The initial launching of Plant the Peace needed five months of work to lead up to it. The group needed to purchase servers, code the website and the games, and file paperwork with the Internal Revenue Service. What once seemed a daunting task turned into a functional project due to the dedication of the three members, Maxwell Landy, Maxwell Steitz, and Franziska Trautmann. On launch day, Plant the Peace released a campaign on social media to spread awareness. They devised a clip that could be shared on Instagram and for each repost, one tree was planted. Within 48 hours, the video had been shared over 1000 times.

This short film coincided with the launching of the organization and had over 1000 reposts on Instagram within 48 hours. @plantthepeace

Plant the Peace prides itself on saving money for spending on trees rather than advertisements. Through its own grassroots campaign in news sources around the United States and social media, the website garnered quite an amount of traffic. In September, the website was refreshed almost 1,000,000 times without paying a cent for publicity. Plant the Peace was forced to purchase a new server after our site continued to crash with such an amount of internet traffic. The organic growth of the website has led to the organization donating almost 10,000 trees with games that are nowhere near their full potential, and demonstrates a strong proof on concept

Since Plant the Peace grew at an unprecedented rate, there was a concern that there would not be enough funds to afford all the trees planted through the educational gameplay. As an insurance policy, the team launched a GoFundMe. Advocating for themselves online, they set a fundraising goal and came close to accomplishing it.

Plant the Peace intends the website to be functional through partnerships with ethical and sustainable brands, rather than seeking out one-time donations from anyone willing to support their cause. One barrier that the team has since rectified was that they lacked an IRS determination letter. After receiving this, they started partnering with businesses who wished to lower their carbon footprint while simultaneously supporting their vision. An example of a partnership they currently have is with Oh Shoot Repairs, an on-campus phone repair company. For every phone that Oh Shoot fixes, the value of five trees is directly donated to Plant the Peace.

Some of the many forms of marketing materials Plant the Peace has directed to business owners in an attempt to inspire them to join the fight against climate change.

 The Plant the Peace team was inspired back in April when they began the long path towards what the concept has become. The team rests assured that the organization will grow exponentially due to the organic growth that has been evidenced since its inception. Having proof that their idea is attractive to the general public is influencing the crew to work even harder than  before to forward the goals of the organization. They are one step closer to slowing climate change and are not intending on slowing down.