CorporatePhilanthropy-EnvironmentalImpact-BigGive

Yesterday, Eleos Compliance transferred a fabulous £6,000 to Pipal Tree as a corporate donation towards its Big Give ‘Earth Raise’ 2026 campaign entitled ‘Leading the way with rapid-growth forests in Nepal’. The Big Give encourages charities to use its matched donation fundraising platform under the slogan ‘One gift, twice the impact’. https://biggive.org/earth-raise/

But what has been the true impact for Pipal Tree?

In terms of financial impact, this pledge has incentivised online donations, those online donors being encouraged to give on the basis of their gift automatically doubling in value through matching pledges being in place. So, the £6,000 pledge effectively translates into £12,000. In fact, it more than doubles since many of those donors are UK-taxpayers and Pipal Tree can reclaim an additional 25% in tax refunds from HMRC under Gift Aid arrangements.

Setting that aside, there is also a brand impact. For The Big Give allows us to raise our profile nationally as an environmental charity that is right at the forefront of the pushback against climate change and loss of biodiversity. We were one of 338 participating charities in ‘Earth Raise’ and we raised the seventeenth most amount of funds. For a small home-based charity it’s quite something to have secured £105,326 from 243 donations. The Big Give acts as a great shop window for new donors and we added over 30 to our database, including one new major Foundation that complemented us on our strategy.

Turning to our operational impact, we have been pioneering the use of the rapid-growth ‘Miyawaki Method’ of reforestation in Nepal since December 2021. The Method encourages trees to grow ten times faster than those planted conventionally. In the urban setting of Kathmandu valley the forests help to clean and cool the air while encouraging a return of biodiversity to the city. To date, our local partner, the social enterprise for vulnerable women ‘Lily’s Leaves’, has planted seven urban forests. These have been supplied with saplings from two Lily’s Leaves nurseries that we have also been able to fund through The Big Give. In south Nepal, working through the NGO Mithila Wildlife Trust, we have been planting Miyawaki forests as stepping stone plantations within a wildlife corridor that we have been restoring. We calculate that a Miyawaki forest costs £10 per square metre, so, through the Big Give we’ve been able to fund 1,200m2 of new forest rather than 600m2.

In both settings, our projects have environmental impact – Kathmandu has one of the worst air qualities of any world city and the south of the country has long since been cleared of forests to make way for farmland that is now exhausted from years of intensive farming. Moreover, here’s a biodiversity impact in terms of a return of species, some of them quite rare – see this link. And there’s a social impact too – in Kathmandu the core workforce at Lily’s Leaves consists of young women who are deaf and who would have little chance of finding employment anywhere else. See this link. And in south Nepal, Big Give funding supports our community bank that provides microloans that help impoverished rural women within the wildlife corridor area to start agricultural and agroforestry initiatives. See this link.

This is a diverse range of impact, but there’s even more. For this week we have been able to generate additional fundraising impact as we’ve used Big Give funds to attempt leverage of major grants from two potential new major donors. For the first, we have offered £10,000 towards an £80,000 bid for a project that will see us recycle sewage into a new powerful eco-compost that could further boost our reforestation success in south Nepal. See this link. And for the second, we have requested a grant of €100,000 towards the purchase of five new landsites within the wildlife corridor area on the basis that we will contribute €40,000 towards the reforestation of those sites.

Twice the impact? That’s not the half of it!

Thank you Eleos Compliance.