2025 Annual Report

A Year of Resilience

I'm writing this letter in 2026, looking back at a year that tested us and proved something important about who we are.

Annual reports have an inherent time warp to them. By the time you're reading this, we're already well into a new year of work. But I've always loved this moment of reflection. It's a chance to take stock, say thank you, and name what we learned.

What I learned in 2025 is that Great River Greening is resilient, and so is this community.

Like many nonprofits, we spent a significant part of 2025 in a holding pattern around federal funding. Reimbursements were uncertain, timelines shifted, and our team had to make careful decisions with incomplete information. We weren't alone in that uncertainty, but I won't pretend it wasn't hard. It required patience, discipline, and a lot of trust from our staff, our board, and our community.

We moved forward anyway.

By year's end, we had restored or sustainably managed more acres, planted more trees, and engaged more volunteers than ever before. We reached 1,211 students across six schools through Future Stewards. We planted 2,025 red pines in the Superior National Forest to help land recover from wildfire -- our first event there. The rusty patched bumble bee returned to our monitoring sites in record numbers.

We also celebrated 30 years. Resilience is the right word for an organization like ours: born from community, started by neighbors who looked at degraded land and said, let's fix this, now committed to restoring and sustainably managing 100,000 acres across all of Minnesota by 2030.

Thank you for being part of it.

Kateri

MCAP 2025 ORGANIZATION ADAPTATION AWARD

Great River Greening was honored to receive the UMN Climate Adaptation Partnership’s Organization Adaptation Award celebrating climate leadership and forward-thinking action for our Vision for 2030 — a bold commitment to restoring 100,000 acres of Minnesota’s lands by the end of this decade.

POLLINATORS

Our pollinator corridors and restored prairies saw an increase in the number of native bee species, growth in bumblebee species diversity, and the return of the federally endangered rusty patched bumble bee to our monitoring sites, with a record number of observations this summer!

HEALTHY WATERS INITIATIVE

We announced a multi-year effort, supported by the Minnesota Twins and Uponor, a GF Building FlowSolutions brand, to restore critical lands, strengthen the vitality of our waterways, and build healthier, more resilient communities for generations to come.

30th ANNIVERSARY

We celebrated three decades of Greening, with thanks to Ellen Brown and former Mayor of Saint Paul Norm Coleman, our 30th Anniversary Co-Chairs. Diving into our history and finding new ways to tell our story, we were able to connect with the roots of the organization and developed our Founder’s Circle, comprised of the people who gave Great River Greening our start.

SUPERIOR NATIONAL FOREST

We are expanding throughout the state! We hosted our first event in the Superior National Forest, where Greening volunteers planted 2,025 red pines to reforest areas impacted by wildfire.

BIOCHAR

US Biochar Initiative invited Greening to be the biochar on-site experts at their national conference. This field-day demonstration showcased multiple flame cap kilns, including Minnesota’s first big-box mobile kiln, and how biochar can be used in land management and restoration.