Andy Lipkis began planting trees to rehabilitate smog and fire damaged areas around Los Angeles when he was 15 years old. At age 18, in 1973, he founded TreePeople, and continues to serve as its president. Now one of California’s largest independent environmental organizations, TreePeople is dedicated to helping nature heal our cities. TreePeople inspires, engages, educates, trains, mobilizes and supports volunteers to plant and care for trees and forests in and around the Los Angeles area. Over the past nearly four decades, TreePeople has been responsible for over two million more trees in Southern California, environmental education for hundreds of thousands of children, and a model for “citizen forestry” that has been emulated across the country and internationally.

Mr Lipkis is a creative problem solver who addresses pressing public health, economic, and environmental issues by forging partnerships between diverse and sometimes conflicting parties. Among Mr Lipkis’s accomplishments is a successful campaign that inspired the planting of one million trees in Los Angeles before the 1984 Summer Olympics. With his wife Kate, Mr Lipkis authored The Simple Act of Planting a Tree, the book that helped launch citizen forestry. Most recently, TreePeople completed construction of the TreePeople Center for Community Forestry, with a LEED Platinum conference center and urban watershed education center in the heart of Los Angeles.

Over the past 15 years Mr Lipkis has spearheaded an approach using trees and forest-inspired technologies in city landscapes to create a sustainable water supply as well as flood and pollution prevention. “Functioning Community Forests,” are being demonstrated in a long term retrofit of the Sun Valley area of Los Angeles (pop. 80,000) creating a new paradigm for urban environmental health and sustainability.

Mr Lipkis honors include being named to the U.N. Environment Programme’s Global 500 Roll of Honour, and receiving American Forests’ Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2007, he was named a Durfee Fellow, and in 2008 he was named an Ashoka Fellow for his work as a world-changing social entrepreneur.