BeechTree's Origins

In the winter of 2025, as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was abruptly shuttered, my wife and I—both longtime USAID employees—spent many hours walking in the quiet woods near our home. A highlight of those walks were the dramatic, hundreds year old American beech trees. Our infant daughter’s gaze often veered to their dramatic crowns and smooth gray bark. Ours followed. Those trees served as a powerful reminder. The systems that we rely upon are a delicate, hard, and beautiful truth. These beech trees—specific, individual trees we grew to love—are navigating population pressures, countless carved initials of the lovestruck, and dangerous pathogens. They were a powerful inspiration during a hard time. 
 
It was also on those walks that the idea for a technically minded, climate-centered search firm took shape. The closure of USAID, the world’s largest development agency, was not only a personal loss, but also a seismic event for the international development and climate change sectors. Even more than the loss of our own jobs, what hit us the hardest was the fate of our friends and colleagues—talented experts with years of specialized training—who were suddenly and unjustly sidelined. These were people who had dedicated their careers to tackling the world’s most urgent challenges including climate change, but also public health, food insecurity, democratic backsliding, and responding to humanitarian crises. Now, at the very moment their skills were most needed, many of the field’s brightest minds were sidelined.  BeechTree emerged.
 
The beech trees offered more than just inspiration, they are also a near-perfect metaphor for the climate change and resilience sectors. While climate change has stressed the species, beech trees are also adapting and even thriving as the climate changes. This can be attributed to their ability to doggedly survive in the understory, expansive root system and powerful mycorrhizal networks, and ability to find niches in challenging environments. Furthermore, they ‘do their part’ by sequestering carbon, bolstering forest resilience, and providing critical ecosystem services. They are, in essence, problem solvers, stoic in the face of change and daunting challenges.  Similarly, the climate sector is thriving—paradoxically—due to a collective failure to address the climate crisis.

Just as beech trees adapt and strengthen the forests around them, BeechTree exists to support the ecosystem of problem solvers who may well be doing humanity’s most important job: solving the climate crisis. Our goal is to help this sector flourish.