Team Trees

Team Trees, also known as #TeamTrees, is a collaborative fundraiser that managed to raise 20 million U.S. dollars before 2020 to plant 20 million trees. This initiative was founded by MrBeast and Mark Rober and it was supported by a large part of the YouTube community as a whole, including some YouTube personalities.

All donations go to the Arbor Day Foundation, a tree-planting organization that pledges to plant one tree for every U.S. dollar donated. The Arbor Day Foundation planned to begin planting in January 2020 and end "no later than December 2022".

It is estimated that 20 million trees would take up 180 square kilometers (69 square miles) of land, absorb around 1.6 million tons of carbon and remove 116 thousand tons of chemical air pollution from the atmosphere.

History
The idea started on May 24, 2019, when a fan suggested on Reddit that MrBeast should plant 20 million trees to celebrate reaching 20 million subscribers on YouTube. The idea spread across multiple platforms including YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter, mostly in the form of memes. The idea is possibly related to the 2019 Amazon rainforest wildfires.

American YouTuber, engineer, and inventor Mark Rober partnered directly with Donaldson to launch the fundraiser. On October 25, 2019, Donaldson uploaded a YouTube video explaining his plan, which claimed the top spot on YouTube's trending page, and numerous YouTubers have joined the movement, such as PewDiePie, Rhett & Link, Marshmello, Justine, and more.

On December 19, 2019, the project reached the 20 million dollar donation mark. By the next day, the project had raised over $20.7 million, exceeding the fundraiser's original goal. As of August 2020, the project has raised over $22 million.

As of October 31, 2021, the project still exists today, and will continue to exist, and as of that time, $23,000,000 was raised, and around an additional $2,600 are being donated today on average.

Responses
Many YouTubers created content to capitalize on the growing trend of Team Trees. Although despite the Arbor Day Foundation reaching out to only a few hundred creators, Team Trees is now featured in over 8,000 videos from over 400 global creators.

Across Instagram and Twitter, over 556,000 posts have garnered more than 4.6 billion views. Creators were able to uniquely inspire their audience to become donors and supporters of Team Trees through their relationships with their fans.

In addition to social media influencers, large corporations, including Verizon, EA, Salesforce (Marc Benioff), Shopify (CEO Tobias Lutke and CTO Jean-Michel Lemieux), and Tesla (Elon Musk), made large donations to this campaign.