That’s right! We’re trying to raise $25,000 by the end of the school year for our Protect-an-Acre program, and we’re counting on Rainforest Heroes like you to make it happen! Each month Sappy will grow depending on how much money we raise and we’re hoping he’s tall enough to reach the $50,000 mark by summer break. This will really help the worlds’ forests and the Indigenous Peoples that call them home!

It is special because it protects the world’s forests by helping the Indigenous peoples that live in them. Many Indigenous peoples have lived in forest areas for thousands of years. They depend on the forest for food, medicine, clothing and shelter.

Rainforest Action Network's Protect-an-Acre program gives small amounts of money, called grants, to communities of Indigenous people that live in forest areas. The communities then use the money in different ways to help protect their forest homes.

Learn more about Protect-an-Acre.

Because kids raise more money than anyone else to support the program! You may have noticed in the graph that we raised $25,000 for Protect-an-Acre over the last 8 months and are now looking to raise an additional $25,000 in just 4 months. That would mean we need to raise the same amount of money in half the time. But we can do it because of you! Spring is the time of year that we get most of our donations to Protect-an-Acre, mostly through fundraisers at schools by kids like you who care about the world’s forests and want to raise money to save them. Ask your friends or classmates to join you in helping save the rainforest. To raise money, you can:

• Recycle aluminum cans, glass, or plastic for cash.
• Have a Read-A-Thon, Spell-A-Thon, or Jog-A-Thon.
• Hold a bake sale or a lemonade or popcorn sale.
• Have a rainforest rummage sale and sell old toys, clothing, games, and books.
• Put on a rainforest play and charge admission.

Find more ideas on ways to raise money for the rainforest.

Here are a few examples of grants that we made recently through the Protect-an-Acre Fund and what they helped accomplish:

• The Achual community is developing a permaculture project in the in Peruvian Amazon. Permaculture is a type of agriculture that seeks to create harmony between human needs and ecological ones. They are planting tropical fruit trees and other plants that can be harvested and sold to provide money for the community. Meanwhile, they are also planting gardens for food and trees in areas that have been deforested. Through this project the Achual are getting land title, or ownership over their land, which will help them to protect 4,000 acres of rainforest.
• Three Indigenous communities in Malaysian Borneo helped to protect primary rainforest at the headwaters of 3 rivers, which is the place where those rivers first begin as small streams that eventually flow together with other streams. The communities learned how to make maps of the land and water in the area and demarcated, or marked a boundary around, more than 3,000 acres. This helped them get land title to in order to permanently protect the forest.

• Indigenous communities in Canada are known as First Nations communities. Our grants have supported several First Nations, including Grassy Narrows, KI, Ardoch, and Six Nations in the province of Ontario, Canada for a variety of projects to help them protect the boreal forest where they live. The boreal is the largest intact forest left in the world. In response to the work these communities and their supporters have been doing to gain control over their land, the government has promised to protect 50 percent of the province’s northern boreal forest from all industry, and to not allow logging without the approval of First Nations. The planned protected area is 80 times the size of Yosemite National Park!


• The Kennard Classical Junior Academy in St. Louis, MI started a Tiger Pride Club led by teacher Jennifer Beffa, making a rainforest mural and holding a button contest that raised $285.
• The second grade classes of teachers Linda Wong and Selma Qu at Pacific Academy in Richmond, CA created a rainforest in their classroom and raised $100 for the Protect-An-Acre program by making their own ‘Rainforest Mix’ and selling it to friends and relatives.

• Seventh grader Charlie Hale from Northampton, MA raised $1,443.42 by getting sponsored by 34 friends and family members and climbing 17 peaks in the Adirondacks, White Mountains, and Appalachians.


Make a donation to the Protect-an-Acre Fund!