By Jenna Jarrah
When the January 2025 wildfires ravaged through Los Angeles County, devastating communities in Altadena, Pacific Palisades, and Malibu, students faced terrible losses, having their homes and schools turned to ash. These children had dealt with COVID five years earlier, and they again faced disruption and grief.
Seeing these events unfold, Margarita Pagliai, founder of Seven Arrows Elementary School and Little Dolphins Preschool applied the lessons she learned as an educator during COVID and came up with a plan. Pagliai thought kids needed a way forward to turn their pain into purpose. So she founded the initiative TREEAMS (Trees + Dreams).
Inspired by the work of Dr. Jane Goodall, TREEAMS is a student-led wildfire recovery effort to replant, restore, and reimagine a greener and more resilient Los Angeles following the fires.
Pagliai’s relationship with Goodall started 34 years ago, when she brought 150 students and families from Little Dolphins Preschool to meet with the world-renowned scientist in the Pacific Palisades. Thirty years later, Pagliai, inspired by Goodall’s Book of Hope published during COVID, asked Goodall to visit students at Temescal Gateway Park to talk about resilience in the face of life’s tragedies.
“If we take action, and we all work together, we can help any tragedy move forward,” Pagliai remembers Goodall saying. Goodall visited Pacific Palisades four more times. Goodall wanted to work with Pagliai to establish TREEAMS as a way for young people in Los Angeles to have a role in wildfire recovery and rebuilding their communities.
Today, TREEAMS is working to plant 5,000 native trees across Altadena, Pacific Palisades, and Malibu, including replanting efforts in Will Rogers Park, which Pagliaidescribes as the “lungs of Los Angeles.”
But when Pagliai was consulting experts about the project, she ran into a problem: the soil had high levels of toxicity. So TREEAMS decided to plant small trees in nurseries across Los Angeles schools, and have students nurture the young trees until state and community parks were able to receive them.
The first nursery launched on April 21st at EF Academy in Pasadena, where 30 young native trees were planted including California Sycamores, Western Red Buds, and Toyons.
On May 19, 30 trees were planted at the launch of the second nursery at Seven Arrows Elementary in Pacific Palisades. Students from EF Academy mentored elementary school students at Seven Arrows on how to set up the trees to grow and thrive over the next two years before they are permanently planted throughout the Palisades.
Jackson Bonmunkmoran, a 6th-grader at Seven Arrows Elementary who volunteered, said, “I really love the beauty of nature, so it made me really want to bring nature back to the Palisades. And I felt a lot of pain for people who lost so much.”
Jackson is graduating from Seven Arrows Elementary this year and going to a school that has committed to having a nursery. “TREEAMS is a really big movement, and we need all the help we can get,” he said. He plans to visit Seven Arrows Elementary and take care of his tree.
Liam Johnson, a junior at EF Academy was at the event on Tuesday mentoring younger students. Johnson, who works on worm composting using his school cafeteria’s food waste, donated his earthworm castings for the young trees to be planted in organic, fertilizer-rich soil.
“When we heard of the tree nurseries that were going to happen here, I had the idea to use the worm castings to help out,” he said. “I think TREEAMS is a huge movement that is so much larger than us. Just seeing these areas that have been completely devastated be a little greener is pretty nice.”
Rick Duque, an English teacher at EF Pasadena who also leads the Outdoor Education Club, said, “It was really easy recruiting kids for this because everybody wants to contribute in some way, but most people just didn’t know how. And TREEAMS gave us this opportunity.”
The UCLA School of Education and Information Studies and EcoRise have partnered with TREEAMS to put together a curriculum focusing on reforestation, ecosystem rehabilitation and soil remediation to complement the tree planting effort. Schools participating in TREEAMS will be integrating the curriculum into their plans this fall.
With significant interest from dozens of schools across the city, Pagliai hopes to unify LA students and schools through TREEAMS.
“I believe Los Angeles is one of the most incredible cities in the world, because it’s the multitude of people from different roots in life that get together to create something real,” she said. “I do believe in the indomitable spirit, as Jane puts it, of human beings.”