Scout's coffee

Do you remember Girl Scout cookies? We used to sell them to raise funds for our projects as Girl Scouts. But Boy Scouts do other things — they camp, build fires, tie knots and now, they are planting coffee.

- CHIT U. JUAN

It was a serendipitous meeting at the 5 Million Trees launch of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) a few months ago. At this benefit lunch I met secretary general Kim Robert de Leon of the Boy Scouts of the Philippines as we were seated at the same table. Did you know we have 3.5 million scouts around the country? And that 600,000 of them are of the right age to help us plant coffee trees? It was an instant meeting of minds when I broached the idea of having scouts help us plant coffee trees. At the same lunch where corporate stalwarts pledged to plant hundreds of thousands of trees, SG Kim and I cooked up an even more interesting partnership: let big scouts plant coffee trees with the Philippine Coffee Board as we recently signed for almost a million trees with GCash's GForest initiative. We definitely can use the muscle power of senior scouts in digging holes and planting coffee trees along with shade trees sown by our community partners.

SG Kim right away bought into our idea of first asking the scouts to learn more about planting coffee. We right away plotted the many scout chapters or councils in coffee growing areas.