Plant the rain: Water-Harvesting Native Food Forest

Plant the Rain, Cool Our Cities – Help Us Raise $100K to Transform Asphalt Deserts into Urban Food Oases!

The Crisis: Our Cities Are Baking We are living in an increasingly dangerous urban environment. In Tucson, Arizona, extreme heat is taking lives—in 2023 alone, the heatwave contributed to nearly 800 deaths statewide. As extended periods of 110°F+ weather become the norm, without our help, outdoor spaces will become uninhabitable. A major culprit is the way we build: we pave over our watersheds, sending precious rainwater down the storm drains while simultaneously pumping our aquifers dry. This creates a deadly "heat island effect," where exposed asphalt reaches blistering surface temperatures of over 127°F.

The Proven Solution: Planting the Rain Thirty years ago, our sunbaked Tucson neighborhood decided to fight back by breaking the law. By literally cutting holes into the city curbs, we redirected street runoff into sunken roadside basins to "plant the rain" before planting any vegetation.

Today, our neighborhood has been largely transformed into a thriving, resilient ecosystem (but there is still more to be done). By collaborating with native ecology, this grassroots project now captures over 1.25 million gallons of stormwater annually and has supported the planting of over 1,800 native, food-bearing trees. The results are life-saving: the shaded soil in these rainwater basins is up to 30°F cooler than the exposed street asphalt.

What started as an underground guerrilla action is so effective that it actually changed the law, becoming mandatory city policy that now includes rebates for homeowners. We have the prototype to fix our cities—now we need your help to scale it.

How Your $100K Will Be Used We are looking to raise $100,000 to spread this restorative model throughout Tucson and create open-source templates for cities worldwide. Every dollar goes directly toward grassroots action, infrastructure, and education. Here is exactly what your donation will fund:

• Building Next-Generation Green Infrastructure: We will design and install new water-harvesting basins, traffic-calming chicanes, and roundabouts. To lower costs and environmental impact, we will pioneer the use of cost-effective recycled "urbanite" (broken sidewalk chunks) and storm-damaged logs to stabilize basin banks instead of using expensive mined rock.
• Changing City Policy: We will fund ongoing advocacy efforts to mandate denser stormwater-irrigated tree canopies in all parking lots, improve residential greywater ordinances to make greywater stub-outs simpler, cheaper and more obvious, and create simpler, cheaper permitting processes for neighborhood projects.
• Creating Educational Resources: We will create three new books, including a children's book on bringing life to neighborhoods and a how-to guide on passive sun and shade harvesting. We will also produce educational videos and expand the TucsonNativePlants.com database so it can serve as a template for other bioregions.
• Supporting Local Farmers & Ecosystems: We will contract with local native plant growers to enhance the diversity of multi-use native plants grown, sold, and planted throughout the community. When a grower is pre-paid to grow rare plants they will do it, as the plant sale is guaranteed – no risk for the grower.
• Community Stewardship: We will install multilingual plant identification and educational signage along public paths, conduct wildlife surveys to track returning species, and host free community pruning, seeding, and harvesting workshops.

The Call to Action We don't have to be victims of the heat island effect. Anyone with a shovel can move dirt and help recharge the aquifer. Please donate today to help us reach our $100K goal. Together, we can reclaim the public commons for life, not just asphalt, and spread this life-saving prototype to desert cities around the world!