Allegheny County lost 10,148 acres of tree canopy between 2010 and 2015, felled by the emerald ash borer, oak wilt and steady development pressure, and the county is still losing roughly 2% of what remains every five years. Behind the region’s response to that decline is Colcom Foundation, an independent non-profit foundation based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which has funded Tree Pittsburgh, the nonprofit now leading the recovery.

Colcom Foundation has funded Tree Pittsburgh since 2007. Annual general operating support followed in 2012, a form of funding nonprofits typically prize more than project-specific grants because it can be spent wherever the need is greatest. That support underwrites the organization’s Heritage Nursery, where thousands of native trees and shrubs are grown each year for planting throughout the county. It’s a slow, unglamorous pipeline. Over time, it has let Tree Pittsburgh grow from a local planting group into the region’s central urban forestry organization.

How Colcom Foundation Helped Build the Pittsburgh Canopy Alliance

Tree Pittsburgh drew on that growth in 2020, leading formation of the Pittsburgh Canopy Alliance, a coalition of 20 environmental organizations that includes the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, Allegheny Land Trust, Student Conservation Association, Rachel Carson Trails Conservancy, UpstreamPGH and Friends of the Riverfront. The Alliance set a specific, measurable target: no net loss in Allegheny County’s tree coverage, a goal that acknowledges how much ground the region has already lost rather than promising a quick reversal.

No single organization in that coalition could have coordinated a county-wide tree strategy on its own. Land trusts hold conservation easements, parks groups manage public green space, and watershed nonprofits plant along streambanks, but canopy loss cuts across all of that territory at once. Colcom Foundation’s decade of unrestricted operating support gave Tree Pittsburgh the staff capacity and institutional standing to convene the other 19 organizations around a shared inventory of where the county’s tree cover was thinnest.

Two years earlier, before the Alliance existed, Colcom Foundation had already funded a stopgap response to the canopy crisis. Four thousand trees were given away in 2019 and 2020, targeted at the communities hit hardest by losses from the emerald ash borer and development. That earlier effort put trees in the ground while the coalition-building work caught up.

Colcom Foundation’s Backing Helped Pittsburgh Land Federal Tree-Planting Funding

Tree Pittsburgh’s track record, built on years of Colcom Foundation support, helped the Canopy Alliance secure an $8 million U.S. Forest Service grant funded through the Inflation Reduction Act, along with an additional $1 million awarded directly to the city of Pittsburgh. The award is part of a $1.5 billion national USDA program created to expand tree cover in urban communities identified as disadvantaged under federal environmental justice criteria. The five-year, $9 million total awarded to Pittsburgh is earmarked for tree planting, maintenance, environmental education and workforce development in the neighborhoods facing the heaviest pollution burdens and the steepest tree loss.