International Communities

Earlier this year, members of Scouts Croatia supported our Bushfire Relief Campaign with thousands of dollars in donations.

Since 2018, Scouts Croatia have themselves been managing the reforestation campaign “Boranka” to help in reforestation activities in parts of Croatia burned by wildfires, which devasted hundreds of thousands of acres of forests. In the campaign, Scouts gathered huge support and gained great public and media visibility which resulted in more than 2,500 volunteers planting more than 25,000 new trees in 8 weeks of reforestation actions.

The campaign also brought education activities to schools and kindergartens on the topic of nature and forest protection and climate change. More than 5,000 young people were directly involved in workshops. As a creative part of the campaign, tree leftovers from pine trees burnt in wildfires (in Croatian, pine tree is called bor – hence the name Boranka) were used to create unique crayons – called Boralica. These crayons were distributed in 115,000 pieces throughout Croatia and everyone was asked to use them to draw their own trees. They could take a photo of their drawn tree and upload it in a virtual forest, situated on a special Boranka campaign website. For each and every tree planted virtually, Scouts and other Boranka volunteers planted a real one in nature. Soon, the whole country started to draw trees and thousands joined to help the campaign.