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Adopted by TACF’s Board of Directors, these core values are organizational guidelines to ensure the mission to restore the American chestnut to the Eastern forests is a success. Because this mission involves a long journey and is the most complex rescue effort of any plant species ever undertaken, the organization will persevere with patience and optimism.

To accomplish its goals, TACF will make science-based decisions with the integrity necessary to evaluate its work and represent it to the public with transparency. Because of these ambitious goals and ever-changing science, TACF must continually innovate and collaborate with its key stakeholders and overall constituency to remain open to new technologies and ideas.

We are the resolute. We are the hopeful. We are a group of wildly different people: old and young, black and white and brown, indigenous and immigrant, alive on Earth and alive only in memory. Through the decades—from all kinds of different backgrounds, beliefs, and abilities—we’ve found each other in our shared reverence for eastern forests and our grief at the loss of the American chestnut, a once-foundational species here. We’re on a mission to restore this species—and people’s faith in each other.

We do this work to honor our predecessors and the tree they held sacred—a source of food, fuel, and shelter for millennia. We do it to protect this region’s most vulnerable animals and people today. We do it to shelter and sustain our descendants long after we’re gone. We do it to honor callings we’ve felt in our hearts: intellectual, emotional, moral, scientific. Chestnut restoration is personal; it’s generational; it’s exhilarating. And it’s fun.

At The American Chestnut Foundation, we believe we’re lucky to be here in this moment, standing at a precipice between delicate hope and wild, impossible joy. Through decades of scientific study, research, innovation, creativity, and applied love, we’ve developed a plan for returning the iconic American chestnut to its native range—and we’re moving forward into the era of its execution. This is cathedral-building work, work whose completion we likely won’t live to see, but we are so excited to lay the foundations and raise the buttresses. What a meaningful way to spend a life.

In chestnut restoration, we have an opportunity to mend not just one tree species, but human hearts. We can show the world that yes, people can pull themselves and their planet back from the brink; yes, humanity can heal and not just destroy the environment; yes, we all do have a crucial role to play in surrounding ecosystems. As long as tiny embers still smolder in the ashes of our world, neither life nor hope has been extinguished.

That’s why we say we’re rooted in restoration. Our goal is the restoration of the American chestnut, of course, but our dream is of everything that might grow from the achievement of that goal. This tree is not the only species facing an existential threat; the work of world-mending is enormous and ongoing, requiring help from all human beings alive today and then some, forever.

Still: imagine the renewed vigor with which other people might put themselves to the ask once they see what’s possible. Imagine what new growth could photosynthesize in the light of our hope.

Whoever you are, if you share our commitment to mending this place, please join us. If you’re heartbroken, too—or if you’re hopeful, angry, strong, weak, rich, poor, well-organized, or a mess—please join us. This world is all of those things, too. But by working together, we can build sanctuaries that last.

– Written by Anna Sproul-Latimer, Member of TACF’s Board of Directors