This good deed was made possible thanks to a partnership between three organizations: Shatsk National Nature Park, the Tvii Lis (Your Forest) NGO, and DataArt. The National Park provided the land and organized all the planting work, while DataArt helped with financing, and connected Shatsk National Nature Park with Tvii Lis, one of the founders of whom is Dima Deliev, our colleague from Kherson. Dima works for DataArt as a business analyst.
Dima explains:
"We came up with Tvii Lis together with my friends 7 years ago as an eco-loyalty program commissioned by a car-sharing startup. The main goal was to collect donations from businesses and transfer them to forestry. In return, the forestry centers provide partners with detailed information about trees planted. The partners can use this information in their communications and marketing. For example, you can assign a company name to a forest or a single tree (and then find it on an interactive map). You can make personal gift certificates for customers, partners and colleagues, print stickers for your products, or hold a corporate event.
We are proud that more than 250,000 trees have been planted in various forest areas over the past few years with our help."
We should add that Dima, being the founder of the Tvii Lis platform, even received the "Person of the Year" award in Kherson in 2019.
Dima heard at one DataArt corporate event that we have a sustainable development committee that monitors the company's hydrocarbon footprint and takes various measures to reduce it. The committee invited colleagues to share ideas on this topic. Dima already had a lot of practical experience in environmental conservation, and the only thing left was to make a plan.
"I suggested that DataArt enter partnership with our public organization. This combined perfectly with the company's current trend towards sustainable development, and opened up new opportunities:
The company really liked Dima's proposal, and joint work began in the fall of 2021.
The Tvii Lis project was launched in the corporate Talent Lab, in which developers, together with experienced mentor colleagues, are working to improve the existing web platform for interaction between business and forestry.
We raffled off two more large contributions to the forest as prizes in competitions that we held for an external audience in honor of important events — DataArt's 25th anniversary, and Programmer's Day. We presented certificates of gratitude to the contest winners (both, by the way, from Ukraine) for their contribution to the birth of a new forest. DataArt has already transferred all the mentioned contributions to Tvii Lis, which together with Shatsk National Park purchased and prepared everything necessary. The park staff planted the trees, and invites anyone interested to take a tour of the forest.
We thank Dima for his idea and great help. We thank everyone who has participated in fundraising in one way or another. And we hope that in the near future our colleagues will be able to go for a walk in this forest which has appeared thanks to their participation. In the meantime, you can look at it on the map:
This fall, our colleagues in Armenia also participated in tree planting. Together with My Forest Armenia, we planted 2,000 conifers in a mountainous area in Lori Province - the coordinates are 40.410257 44.252610. We hope to repeat this experience in the spring. Armenia badly needs new forests because, so far, there are very few of them in the country.
Tvii Lis has no plans to stop — it has already been contacted from several forestry departments with proposals for cooperation. We also want to offer cooperation to some of our clients, and we are currently developing possible formats of interaction through the Tvii Lis platform.
We believe that there will be more new forests on the planet come spring.
