One of the objectives of Green Communities project is to plant trees on the roadsides, in the nearby areas of schools, kindergartens, community and art centres. According to the contracts signed with the communities, the village municipalities and Community Action Groups are obliged to protect and nurse the trees. Shen follows up the progress of that project through its field offices.
In 2006 Shen launched a new initiative aiming at to support the beneficiary communities to become clean and green. Since 2010 within the framework of Green Communities project Shen donated forest and ornamental trees from its nursery to about 40 villages in Kotayk, Aragatsotn and Gegharkunik marzes. As the annual monitorings show most of the trees are properly taken care of thus making the communities beautiful.
In 2010 Yalkezian Foundation (Canada), diasporan partner of Shen NGO decided to take part in these endeavours. With the support of the Foundation annually over 1,000 trees are provided to Shen's beneficiary villages all over the country. In all involved communities the necessary construction and renovation of irrigation networks are being carried out.
The second objective of the Green Communities project is to facilitate the cleaning of the villages and further organization of sustainable garbage removal. The first success was recorded in Berdavan of Tavush marz and Pambak of Gegharkunik marz where landfills were organised by the decrees of respective municipalities. The landfills were established with the direct involvement of CAGs, schoolchildren and community members. The goal was to reach sustainability through providing paid (done by the residents) services. Today more than 40 villages organise and regularly implement garbage removal from thier communities.
A complementary activity of this project was the introduction of biohumus production which, besides its direct benefits have side effect of keeping the village roads clean. In 12 communities where people are engaged in animal husbandry, Shen organic agriculture extension group organized a training on the production of humus and provided the interested community members with the necessary amount of Californian red worms. After 6 months Shen monitoring group found out that some farmers started to fertilize their apple orchards, and the number of biohumus piles grew. The success of the porject will be replicated in other regions of Armenia.
