Dear YWCA Community,As many of you know, in late August, we lost several beautiful and mature trees on our property unnecessarily. To learn more about what took place, please see our joint statement with Duke Energy as well as the coverage by the Asheville Citizen Times.Moving forward, while we know that we can never replace the trees that were lost, we are excited to work collaboratively with Duke and our community to create a beautification project on the site where the trees once stood. We will be gathering feedback from the community until October 15th in the following ways:

• Have an idea of what you would like to see on our grounds? Email us at trees@ywcaofasheville.org.
• Come in to our facility. Next week, we will have 4 construction paper trees located throughout the building with sticky notes available. Please share your thoughts, dreams, and visions for the future tree area on those sticky notes and place them on the trees.

After October 15th, our staff will come together to assess and implement community feedback. We thank you for your continued participation and support. As our CEO Libby Kyles stated, we are "hopeful that a lot of learning will come from this process.... In order for us to move forward as a community, we accept what happened and now we do what we can to rectify the situation. We can’t fix trees. They won’t magically reappear. But we can mend relationships and make sure this doesn’t happen again.”