Team Trees (stylized as #TEAMTREES) is a collaborative fundraiser that raised 20 million

U.S. dollars The United States dollar (symbol: $; currency code: USD) is the official currency of the United States and several other countries. The Coinage Act of 1792 introduced the U.S. dollar at par with the Spanish silver dollar, divided it int ...

before the start of 2020 to plant 20 million trees. The initiative was started by American

YouTuber A YouTuber is a content creator and social media influencer who uploads or creates videos on the online video-sharing website YouTube, typically posting to their personal YouTube channel. The term was first used in the English language in 2006 ...

MrBeast James Stephen "Jimmy" Donaldson (born May 7, 1998), commonly known by his online alias MrBeast, is an American YouTuber, media personality, and businessman. His YouTube videos, where he often hosts elaborate challenges and philanthropic effor ...

and

Mark Rober Mark Rober is an American YouTuber, engineer, inventor, and educator. He is known for his YouTube videos on popular science and do it yourself, do-it-yourself gadgets. Before he became a YouTuber, Rober was an engineer with NASA for nine years, ...

, and was mostly supported by YouTubers. All donations go to the

Arbor Day Foundation The Arbor Day Foundation is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership organization dedicated to planting trees. The Arbor Day Foundation has more than one million members and has planted more than 500 million trees in neighborhoods, communitie ...

, a

tree planting Tree planting is the process of transplanting tree seedlings, generally for forestry, land reclamation, or landscaping purposes. It differs from the transplantation of larger trees in arboriculture and from the lower-cost but slower and les ...

organization that pledges to plant one tree for every U.S. dollar donated. The Arbor Day Foundation began planting in January 2020 with plans to end "no later than December 2022". It is estimated that 23 million trees would take up of land, absorb around 1.6 million tons of

carbon Carbon () is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol C and atomic number 6. It is nonmetallic and tetravalence, tetravalent—meaning that its atoms are able to form up to four covalent bonds due to its valence shell exhibiting 4 ...

and remove 116 thousand tons of

pollutants A pollutant or novel entity is a substance or energy introduced into the environment that has undesired effect, or adversely affects the usefulness of a resource. These can be both naturally forming (i.e. minerals or extracted compounds like oi ...

from the atmosphere.

Background

The idea started on May 24, 2019, when a fan suggested on

Reddit Reddit ( ) is an American Proprietary software, proprietary social news news aggregator, aggregation and Internet forum, forum Social media, social media platform. Registered users (commonly referred to as "redditors") submit content to the ...

that

(Jimmy Donaldson) should plant 20 million trees to celebrate reaching 20 million subscribers on YouTube. The idea spread across

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

, and

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

, mostly in the form of

meme A meme (; ) is an idea, behavior, or style that Mimesis, spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying c ...

s. The idea may have been related to the

2019 Amazon rainforest wildfires The 2019 Amazon rainforest wildfires season saw a year-to-year surge in fires occurring in the Amazon rainforest and Amazon biome within Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru during that year's Amazonian tropical dry season. Fires normally occur ...

. American YouTuber, engineer, and inventor

partnered directly with Donaldson to launch the fundraiser. On October 25, 2019, Donaldson uploaded a YouTube video explaining his plan, which claimed the top spot on YouTube's trending page, and caused numerous YouTubers to join the movement. The trees will be planted "in a variety of forests on public and private lands in areas of great need" starting in January 2020. The goal is to have them planted "no later than December 2022". As of April 26, 2025, the project has raised over $24,873,500 exceeding the fundraiser's goal to plant 20 million trees. As anticipated, more than 20 million trees have been planted.

Efficacy

As of April 2025, only 6% of the original 2,000 trees planted in one area were extant.

Responses

Many YouTubers created content to capitalize on the growing trend of Team Trees; despite the

reaching out to only a few hundred creators, Team Trees is now featured in over 80,000 videos from over 4200 global creators. Across Instagram and Twitter over 556,001 posts have garnered more than 4.6 billion views.

Discovery Channel Discovery Channel, known as The Discovery Channel from 1985 to 1995, and often referred to as simply Discovery, is an American cable channel that is best known for its ongoing reality television shows and promotion of pseudoscience. It init ...

made a documentary called ''#TeamTrees'' about the campaign which aired on December 3, 2019, coupled with a donation of USD $100,203 the next day. Eike Lüdeling, the department head of horticultural sciences at the

University of Bonn The University of Bonn, officially the Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn (), is a public research university in Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was founded in its present form as the () on 18 October 1818 by Frederick Willi ...

, stated, "It turns out that many of these seedlings, if you don't do this well or if people do it who don’t really care about those trees, then they all just die quickly. Sometimes it’s probably a better idea to plant fewer trees and really take care of them." Danny Cohn, the director of public relations for the

, addressed these concerns, stating that "the partners who work with the organization are all required to have plans to help their trees thrive."

Planting projects

Planting locations of Team Trees include:

Team Seas

On October 29, 2021,

and

teamed up again to launch Team Seas, a successor to the project that aimed to help clean up

marine debris Marine debris, also known as marine litter, is human-created solid material that has deliberately or accidentally been released in seas or the ocean. Floating oceanic debris tends to accumulate at the center of gyres and on coastlines, freque ...

. As with the Team Trees campaign, many influencers had also joined in spreading the message to help the project be a success. While the project is international,

and

traveled to the

Dominican Republic The Dominican Republic is a country located on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles of the Caribbean Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean. It shares a Maritime boundary, maritime border with Puerto Rico to the east and ...

to help clean up there and address issues with trash collection in underdeveloped and underserved areas.

References

External links

* {{MrBeast 2019 in Internet culture Conservation projects Hashtags Fundraising events Forestry initiatives Internet activism MrBeast