High in the Andes, where most trees can’t survive, a forest is returning to the slopes of South America's longest mountain range. The trees here — Polylepis, a genus so adapted to altitude it can survive where almost nothing else does — grow slowly with some living for a thousand years.
These trees were once widespread across the highland corridors throughout Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. Decades of grazing, burning, and agricultural clearing took most of them. What remained became some of the most critically threatened forest habitat on the continent, holding the headwaters of rivers that hundreds of millions of people downstream depend on.
Today, more than 343,580 of those trees are back in the ground, part of a multi-year, multi-country One Tree Planted restoration effort working alongside Indigenous communities who have the deepest stake in what grows there. This critical work was funded in part by Humble Bundle, an online store known for curated, limited-time bundles of games, ebooks, and software. Since its launch, it has made charity central to its mission.
Giving as Architecture
Humble Bundle’s digital marketplace allows customers to set their own price for curated bundles of games, software, and books, then, they can choose how that payment divides between publishers, Humble Bundle, and a charitable cause. The philanthropic mechanism has been embedded into the transaction since co-founders Jeff Rosen and John Graham launched the company in 2010—making giving synonymous with gaming—and the outcomes accumulate in places like the Andes.
In 2025 alone, the platform and its users raised over $10 million for more than 4,000 charities, across impact areas ranging from health and disaster relief to climate and education. Since partnering with One Tree Planted in 2021, Humble Bundle's community has directed more than $1.7 million toward reforestation projects across five continents, including the Polylepis project.
Most corporate giving is structured around pledges and campaigns that feel separate from the core business. This is a meaningfully different model: one rooted in the company’s mission to be a force for good in the world through gaming. It is not just a program; it is part of the company’s ethos.
For One Tree Planted, the consistency of a partnership like this translates into the kind of project commitments that make long-term ecological work possible. "When a partner shows up year after year, we can make promises to communities and ecosystems that we couldn't otherwise make," said Leila Melody, Chief Operations Officer. "That reliability is rarer than it sounds, and more meaningful than you can imagine. It changes what's achievable in the field."
What Five Years of Funding Looks Like
The Andes project may be the clearest illustration of what partnerships like this can achieve, but it isn't the only one. Humble Bundle's giving has followed ecological needs rather than any fixed regional preference, which means the projects look very different from each other — and that range is part of the story.
In Uganda's Albertine Rift, more than 6,500 trees went into the Budongo-Bugoma Corridor — a stretch of landscape linking two protected forests that together support the largest population of chimpanzees in Uganda — an estimated 1,000 animals. Corridor restoration is one of the most consequential and least photogenic forms of reforestation. It doesn't produce a neat hillside of young trees. It produces a connected habitat that wildlife can actually move through — the difference between a population that survives and one that doesn't.
In India, 142,858 native trees were planted along the Kaveri River Basin — the third-largest river in the country — where two decades of ecological degradation had compromised the watershed's ability to regulate water and support biodiversity. The species selected for that project were chosen specifically for their capacity to stabilize banks, filter runoff, and recover the biological community the river had sustained before the land around it changed.
Back in the Andes, the Polylepis forests being restored supports something that can't be replanted: the headwaters of the Amazon. Trees at altitude hold moisture in ways that shape rainfall patterns across an entire continent. The communities doing the planting know this. They've known it for generations.
The Case for Sustained Partnership
The Humble Bundle partnership with One Tree Planted — $1.7 million over five years, across projects on four continents — doesn't happen through a one-time campaign. It happens because the mechanism is embedded in how the business works, and because the relationship between the platform and its charitable partners has enough structure to survive a news cycle.
2026 marks Humble Bundle's 15th anniversary. Having surpassed $275 million raised for charitable causes globally, the platform stands as a case study in what sustained, embedded corporate giving can produce. The Polylepis trees returning to the Andes will be growing long after the headlines that didn't accompany them have faded. And that's precisely the point.
