Anything seems possible on the Internet, so why not a site that would enable users to simultaneously buy music and plant a tree.
Great idea, hard to implement.
“I just kept running into barrier after barrier with royalties and getting access to licensing music,” Thomas Solinsky says. “So with all of those roadblocks, I just kept going with the tree planting part.”
That original vision is on the back burner for now as Solinsky has been too busy planting trees to work on it.
“Since I couldn’t find a non-profit I felt comfortable donating to, I started soundforest, which is a 501(c)(3),” he explains. “I hope to someday so something with the music portion of it, but I realized I would need to run the music site fulltime and then donate to a non-profit. So now that we have the non-profit we can partner with any business who wants to do something for the environment and plant trees on their behalf.”
Users can log onto soundforest.org and, either through donations or by purchasing merchandise like a $25 “tree shirt” in the online store, contribute toward the purchase of trees. Solinsky and his volunteers then plant the trees.
“Planting trees is one of the easiest things we can do to help the environment,” he says. And with 4,500 trees planted to date, the goal for 2011 is to plant 11,000 more.
“At Bell’s Bend, we planted around 2,500 trees last year, and all that was done either through tree shirt sales or where businesses or homeowners paid for the trees,” he says. And while most of the plantings are in Middle Tennessee, they can actually be found in 13 states and seven countries.
Through the website, each tree is cataloged and given a GPS code, although Solinsky is admittedly a little behind updating that part.
“No one was really doing that,” he says. “And now, after doing this, I realize why no one was doing it. It is so much work to catalog everything and put a GPS on it. And there is no mapping software that is affordable where we can do it. Still, if people make a donation or buy a tree shirt I can still track all the trees and send them a catalog number and a photo.”
Dependent solely on volunteers, the business’ growth has been a challenge and a learning experience.
“It has been a test,” he says. “We knew our objective was to help the environment and plant trees, and now we are figuring out ways we can plant more trees and reduce the cost of planting trees.”
One of the upcoming projects that will help them reach their goal of 11,000 trees planted in 2011 will be working with the elephant sanctuary in Hohenwald.
“You can have a tree planted in your name, and that tree will produce free food for the elephants,” Solinsky says. In fact, last year soundforest planted 100 trees – persimmons, figs, apples and pears – at a pot-belly pig sanctuary in Cookeville.
“Fifty trees in 20-25 years can produce a million pounds of food,” he says. “Elephants eat around 300 pounds of food a day. So if we can produce food that doesn’t have to be shipped anywhere and it just falls, we can really help the environment by reducing transport cost.”