Purpose Groups
The heart of our mission is restoring relationships. Broken relationships are at the root of oppression, inequality, and poverty. Purpose Groups are our platform for restoring these relationships from a variety of angles. Community members discover their inherent agency and reduce poverty holistically through four components:
Savings Groups
The average Purpose Group participant has 2.5 months of expenses saved. This provides resilience against emergencies, natural disasters, climate change, and more. In fact, the increased resilience of Purpose Group members has been documented in a recent peer-reviewed study.
Farmer Field Schools
Farmer Field Schools create a platform for participating farmers to test and co-develop regenerative agriculture practices within their communities. These practices rebuild healthy soil, increasing crop diversity and yields long term. Participants in Purpose Groups apply 89% more regenerative agriculture techniques than nonparticipants. These techniques include:
- Composting
- Use of green manure or cover crops
- Establishment of woodlots
- Agroforestry
- No-till or minimum tillage
- Terrace farming
Spiritual Renewal
95% of participants agree with the statement, “I now feel pride in the work I do.”
As members in a group work together to develop their skills, they also discover opportunities to apply their knowledge to meeting community needs. Over time, this establishes a norm of group members working together to solve shared problems. The result is a widespread sense of collaboration and agency, one where members are enthusiastic about their community’s ability to be transformed by its own people. These habits evolve into an overarching sense of solidarity and mutual support, which leads to more unified communities. Particularly in countries where peace is fragile, this sense of solidarity greatly decreases the risk of participation in conflict and violence.
Reforestation
Plant With Purpose promotes a wide range of techniques for growing trees. All are applied strategically within a watershed and lead to a maximum impact on landscape restoration, poverty alleviation, and community ownership.
- Tree planting
- Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR)
- Agroforestry
- Community forestry
- Native seed collection
Participants plant 4.3x more trees than nonparticipants.
Plant With Purpose CEO Scott Sabin highlights, “It is important to plant trees for the right purpose. Yes, trees have an important impact on the climate, but they also need to make sense to the people who live where they will be planted. In our case, they provide food, fuel, fodder, fertilizer, and local ecosystem benefits. A unit of Plant With Purpose’s environmental restoration curriculum, Seeds of Change, is all about agroforestry: using trees on farms to improve farm production and sustainability. Our partners plant trees because they have learned that trees directly benefit them, not because we pay them to put seedlings in the ground.”
This impact also stretches beyond our participants to the larger population of the surrounding watershed. Simply being in an area that has been restored makes a big difference.
Step into a Purpose Group
Trust & Transparency
