EL MONTE, Calif. — They may not give off much shade at the moment, but when they grow up, the baby eastern redbud trees recently planted in El Monte will be 20 to 25 feet tall, enough to cool off the entire block.
Marcos Trinidad is the senior director of programs for TreePeople, which planted the trees along the sidewalk outside a school that was strategically selected to address several community concerns.
“Excessive heat, air quality, and then just the overall need for shade,” he explained.
Over the past 50 years, TreePeople has planted and cared for over three million trees across Southern California, but some of that work is now on hold.
The nonprofit has paused about $14 million worth of projects that rely on federal grant money, which remains frozen since shortly after President Trump’s inauguration. This includes already established plans to plant and distribute some 19,000 trees across ten communities, including in the San Gabriel Valley.
Part of the change is rooted in the executive branch’s orders around DEI initiatives.
“These are underserved communities and typically communities of color,” Trinidad said. “All projects that had that tagline, that were identified as possibly being associated with diversity, equity and inclusion, were on the chopping block.”
David Diaz is the executive director of Active San Gabriel Valley, an environmental justice and public health nonprofit that has partnered with TreePeople on some of these projects.
El Monte, he said, is one of the most pollution-burdened communities in the country — crisscrossed by freeways full of trucks carrying good from the ports to the rest of the country, home to a small airport and suffering from a lack of clean public transit options.
All of that plus rising temperatures, he said, makes trees an issue of health equity.
“We really have a community that suffers from being park poor, pollution burdened, poverty impacted,” Diaz explained. “That’s led to poor health outcomes.”
Like asthma, something he himself has suffered from since he was a child.
El Monte, he said, has only about 5% tree cover and the money that had been promised to TreePeople is money that was promised to El Monte.
“If you’re a San Gabriel Valley resident, this is money that should be going to the San Gabriel Valley that’s not landing here,” Diaz said.
Trinidad isn’t sure what’s going to happen to the frozen funding, but he knows one thing — nothing is going to chill TreePeople’s commitment to communities in need.
“If it’s not with federal funding, we’ll find a way because these projects really are that important,” he said. “We treat tree planting as if our lives depend on it.”
Because increasingly, he says, it does.
