Let’s Plant A Butterfly Forest.
Last year, we planted a 200sqft Tiny Forest in the LA Desert. Now, we’re growing a quarter-acre forest.
Hi, we’re “For Every Star, A Tree.”
We’re a loose network of people from all over the world, and we’re working together to grow a .25-acre Butterfly Forest in the Mojave Desert of Los Angeles county.
You can find out more about our work by visiting our website, or looking at our Year In Review reports from 2023, 2022, and 2021.
Here’s what we’re up to.
Thanks to the Monarch Joint Venture program, our nonprofit has been gifted native California milkweed plants to help us start our .25-acre Butterfly Forest.
We’re inviting volunteers, local residents, and organizations to come play with us in the desert to help bring this Butterfly Forest to life.
WATER FIGHT! 💦 (Family-Friendly)
Every Saturday, we’re hosting WATER FIGHTS 💦 — a family-friendly way to help bring the earth back to life.
Only 1.5hrs from Los Angeles, you’re invited to come to the desert and get soaked.
This is our playful way of watering the plants, listening to music, and enjoying each other’s presence beneath the stars.
Bring a towel, a water gun, water balloons, a hose, a bucket — anything you can think of.
Just come ready for fun.
RSVP is 100% free. We do ask for donations to help cover the cost of food and drinks for volunteers.
RSVP here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/water-fight-family-friendly-tickets-1001003808337
Volunteer Chores
Prefer staying dry? No sweat! Here are other Butterfly Forest chores we need help with:
- Shoveling Soil and Mulch
- Watering the Plants by Hand
- Setting up a .25-Acre Fence
- Composting Old Food
- Talking & Singing to Plants
- Playing with Animals
- Dreaming Together and stare up at the Starry Night Sky
Volunteers are the backbone, the lifeblood, and the essential, core element of what keeps our Butterfly Forest dream alive.
If you have the ability to stop by for a day trip — or even spend the night — we can gift you food, water, and our Tiny House (the Starry Night Skoolie) as a thank you for your efforts.
So…Why A Butterfly Forest?
There has been more than a 95% (!!) decline in Western Monarch Butterflies in the last 40 years. These adventurous butterflies travel more than one thousand miles between the Americas. They need green patches in the desert to help protect, feed, and shelter them during their migration.
This is our vision for “Act Local, Think Global.” We know the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat is dependent on all of us coming together to create a greener, cleaner tomorrow.
We know that what’s good for butterflies, is good for us.
Meet The Players.
Our Partners
Our partners for this Butterfly Forest include Erin Arnsteen (the Monarch Joint Venture Western Program Coordinator), Rodger Hill (the Los Angeles Sanitation Equipment Supervisor), Enrique (the Los Angeles Sanitation Delivery Driver), Cosmic Labyrinth (an ecological collective), and John Craig (founder of WeCompost2).
Previous Tiny Forest partners include Charan Singh and Ravneet Singh (EcoSikh), Shubhendu Sharma (founder of Afforestt), Kei Hayashi (founder of KGarage Ventures), and Shahzad Qureshi (founder of Urban Forest Pakistan).
Our Advisors
We’ve received mentorship, guidance, and advice from several incredible individuals. Taylor Casalena has researched pollinators like the Western Monarch, the elusive Mojave Blue Butterfly, the Tricolored Blackbird, and the Mojave Desert Tortoise. She is a remote collaborator in our Butterfly Forest project. Robin Sukhadia is a nonprofit consultant who has helped us consider questions of longevity, administration, and mission. Amos White (100K Trees) has helped brainstorm numbers, logistics, and science-backed data. Ladale Hayes (Operation Flame) nominated For Every Star A Tree for the USC Nonprofit Resilient Leaders Program, which has been instrumental in our nonprofit’s mission. Raychel Espiritu, Alena Solonina, and Rebecca Saletta (founders of The RAR Studio) were incredibly thoughtful collaborators during For Every Star A Tree’s participation in their Female Founders Bootcamp.
Our Volunteers
We’ve also been blessed with over 100 visitors, volunteers, and guests who have come to the land to offer help. Thanks to the incredible team of core volunteers who help keep the Tiny Forest alive, our For Every Star A Tree collective is grateful for all the in-person and online support. Our on-the-ground earthworkers include myself, Margarita, Eddie, Louie, Rashonda, Joe, and even my four year old daughter — who has been by my side planting and watering ever since she could walk.
Our Donors
We would be nothing without the individual donations of caring and compassionate people around the world. This is a long list that includes incredible fundraisers like Cara Lee Lopez, a local Los Angeles author and storyteller who donated her book sales to help extend the Butterfly Forest. Maxwell and Snow are two cats (!!) that somehow donate $5 each month to help keep our Butterfly Forest alive. Rodger Savory (founder of Deserts To Grassland) generously gifted us free winterthorn tree seeds for planting.
Our Guests
We’re also grateful to the glamping and camping communities. We’ve hosted over 100 guests at our Tiny House (spoiler: it’s actually a bus) to help us fund our mission. Each stay plants a tree and helps us grow our 200sqft Tiny Forest into a .25-acre Butterfly Forest.
Other Ways To Play
Donating directly to our nonprofit is the best way to help #SaveTheOrangeWave.
Here are several other ways you can help us plant a Butterfly Forest:
Host An Event
Last month, Cosmic Labyrinth organized a mini-festival where they invited their network to help build a sacred eco-toilet in the desert. We’re grateful for these eco warriors as we now have an “elevated” outhouse which will feed the garden with all the nutrients it needs!
Are you an artist, musician, influencer, or event organizer? Check out our Partner page and book some time on our calendar. We’d love to collaborate with you, and bring your vision to life.
Donate Garden Supplies
We need tools, materials, and other physical items to help make this quarter-acre Butterfly Forest a reality.
You can check out our Amazon Wish List to see what items we still need.
You can also donate any old buckets, shovels, gloves, hats, tires, and water storage items (like 5-gallon water jugs). We’ll coordinate a time for you to drop them off — or we’ll meet you and pick them up.
Together, we can grow a forest.
For Every Star A Tree is a nonprofit that was founded in 2023. But the story doesn’t quite start there.
During the pandemic, I was inspired by people all over the world — India, Mexico, Kenya, China — that were planting trees in the desert.
I came up with a plan to do something similar, and presented it to my Cornell University Small Farms extension class. (You can watch it on YouTube.)
In 2021, my family and friends and I planted a micro oasis in the middle of nowhere. Sadly, vandals came and destroyed it 💔
In 2022, we came back stronger (and beefed up our security). That’s how For Every Star A Tree, our 10-acre ecological restoration site, came to be.
Our work is funded by guests who stay overnight in our Tiny House, affectionally known as the Starry Night Skoolie. Their bookings provide the funds we need to create and maintain the Tiny Forest, the Pollinator Gardens, and our next project: the Butterfly Forest.
Our mission? To help regenerate the earth…one abandoned, desertified patch of land at a time.
Thanks for reading.
If you enjoyed this, I invite you to peruse our Medium publication.
It features over 15 articles about our 10-acre ecofarm dream.
It starts with the conception and will end — one day — with its completion.
About the Author
Billimarie Lubiano Robinson is a wandering writer and artist.
From 2011 to 2015, she traveled around the U.S. with her pink 1950’s Royal typewriter and typed hundreds of spontaneous #FreePoetry poems for strangers on the spot. Well-versed in the art of reckless wandering, Billimarie has backpacked Hawaii, hitchhiked the West, lived in a Parisian bookstore, and survived a Swedish winter alone in the remote wilderness. Her work has appeared in FIYAH, the Newer York, the Northridge Review, Marías at Sampaguitas, Pussy Magic, the Eastern Iowa Review, as well as on her websites (Billimarie.com, TypewriterPoetry.com).
Billimarie and her daughter currently live part-time in their tiny home and art studio, the Starry Night Skoolie. When they’re not in the desert watering trees and telling stories around a campfire, they call Los Angeles home.
