Timberland’s KOMBIT Documentary: Beyond Philanthropy – Creating a Self-Sustaining Social Impact Model

A once rich agricultural community, the country of Haiti has faced environmental devastation for decades. As a result, the country had become one of the most severely deforested areas in the world, with only 1.5 percent tree cover remaining. And although many nonprofits and organizations have provided support following disasters, the people of Haiti needed something more long-term. Here, outdoor lifestyle brand Timberland* saw an opportunity to make an impact.

Last week at the Sustainable Brands Conference in San Diego, Timberland screened “KOMBIT: The Cooperative,” a documentary film chronicling a five-year project to reforest Haiti in partnership with the Smallholder Farmers Alliance (SFA), a Haitian nonprofit farmer cooperative dedicated to reforesting the country. The documentary followed the project from its inception – a Clinton Global Initiative commitment from Timberland to plant five million trees in five years in Haiti, on the island of Hispaniola, where they have had a manufacturing facility for decades. The film, produced by the award-winning filmmakers at Found Object, showed how the project’s partnership with the SFA evolved into the development of a large-scale, self-sustaining agroforestry program owned and operated by smallholder farmers. Farmers volunteer to tend to a network of nurseries producing one million trees annually, and in turn they receive training, seeds, seedlings and tools to restore their own crops yields.

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*Cone client