Trees🌳 Bees🐝 and Goats🐐 Please!

Shivan, a Batwa boy from Kalehe Village, stands inside his family goat pen with a white-and-black mama goat nursing her twins, one white and one brown. Three other goats stand nearby.

As 2025 draws to a close, Redemption Song Foundation is thrilled to launch our Trees, Bees, and Goats, Please! fundraiser for the Batwa of Kalehe Village. This campaign will lead up to and go beyond #GivingTuesday, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. But it's more than just a fundraiser: it’s a powerful way for you to invest in sustainable food, ecological restoration, and dignity for a marginalized Indigenous community that lost access to its ancestral forest through unjust forces.

Trees: Healing the Land and the People

As people of the forest, the Batwa lived from time immemorial in the tropical rainforests of east-central Africa until the 1990s when they were evicted. The forest is integral to their life, but most forests are gone outside of the national park. As we like to say: We may not be able to get the Batwa back in the forest, but we can give forest back to the Batwa.

We started our “10,000 Trees” campaign five years ago, and it's going strong at around 3,000 trees planted in Kalehe Village! The Sustainable Food Forest we're helping create is rooted in the belief that ecological restoration must go hand in hand with community revitalization. We’ve planted avocado, jackfruit, passionfruit, mango, and many more types of fruit trees as well as native trees like mahogany, ebony, and black cherry. As we create a food forest in Kalehe Village, it helps stabilize the hillside, reducing erosion, and trees sequester carbon which helps in the battle against climate change. Importantly, it creates food security for generations to come and a beautiful forested environment the Batwa can feel proud to call home.

With every $5 gift, you can plant a tree that nourishes both the earth and the Batwa people. These trees provide food, shade, and ecological resilience, while honoring the Batwa’s deep ancestral connection to the forest.

Bees: Restoring the Buzz

For generations, honey was one of the Batwa’s most important foods. Before they were evicted from Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, Batwa families gathered wild honey from tree hollows (ubuki or tree honey) and from underground hives (ubuhura or ground honey). Honey is an energy-dense staple that sustained Batwa individuals during long treks. High-quality honey was also traded with neighboring communities and used medicinally.

Today, with no access to their ancestral forest, most Batwa families cannot gather wild honey at all. Supporting beekeeping gives them a way to reclaim this essential food, revive cultural knowledge, and eventually generate income — all while strengthening local ecosystems through pollination.

And Meat, Please!

When the Batwa people were evicted from their homeland inside Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in 1991, they lost their right to hunt, forage, and feed their families in the way they once did. Today, buying meat is beyond their budget most times. For these Batwa families, goats are a critical source of protein, nutrition, and economic and food security. Many of the Kalehe Village Batwa families' goat herds have reduced due to the families eating or selling the goats, so we want to bolster their herd with at least one goat kid each family.

Our goat program — described in our blog post “G.O.A.T.s: A Successful Sustainability Project” — uses a “Pass-on-the-Gift” model inspired by the Jane Goodall Institute: each family that receives a goat passes on the first offspring to another family. That means your gift goes twice as far: it helps feed a family and builds long-term self-reliance. Goat manure also becomes fertilizer for gardens, while goat urine is a component of an all-natural insecticide-formula, protecting crops and coffee without harmful chemicals.

Giving Options

• Give a Goat 🐐 Kid: $50 — Provide a family with future food security

• A Goat for X-Mas 🍲 Dinner: $100 — We'd like to give at least one for eating on Christmas Day

• Build a Goat 🐐 Pen: $250 — Ensures safe housing for the animals.

• Repair a Goat 🐐 Pen: $50 — For families in need of goat pen repairs.

• Plant a Tree 🌳: $5 each — Specify native, fruit tree, or coffee tree if desired, or we will pick for you. Trees will be planted in Kalehe Village for the Batwa.

• Build a Bee Hive 🐝: $150 each family — The next step in our Sustainable Food Forest is to give bees!

What Excites You Most About This?

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  Providing Food Security to Batwa
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  Returning Honey Bees to Batwa
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  Trees for Climate Action
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  Helping the Kids Thrive

Vote in our Poll!

A Legacy of Trust + Partnership

This campaign builds on years of collaborative, community-driven work. As detailed in our 10 Years of Impact reflection, Redemption Song Foundation has supported the Batwa with clean water systems, brick home construction, solar power, and educational enrichment — always guided by their priorities.

Our goat and reforestation projects are not one-off aid. They are part of a sustainable, regenerative model that trusts Batwa leadership and preserves their dignity.

How You Can Help Today

1. Donate to “Trees, Bees, and Goats, Please!” via our website. We will apply your donation as needed, or add a comment to specify you want to buy a goat kid, a goat adult, a certain number of trees at $5 each, or the other options outlined above.

2. Share this blog post with your network — on social media, via email, with friends and family — to help us spread the word.

3. Become a monthly supporter. Recurring gifts give us the stability to plan long-term and continue building community-led solutions for the Batwa.

Give Today

Thank you for standing with the Batwa, restoring hope and ecosystems together. Your generosity can ensure that their children grow up with food security, connection to the land, and a future rooted in resilience.