Each month, Helping Hands features a mortgage professional or group that has volunteered to lend a hand to others in need

Ivanna C. Sukkar

As published in Scotsman Guide's Residential Edition, February 2009.

Name Daniel Jacobs, CEO, 1st Metropolitan Mortgage

Project Plant a Billion Trees

Site Brazil

How As part of 1st Metropolitan's BrightGreen Mortgage promotion, the company will help plant a tree for every green mortgage that its participating branches close, Jacobs says. The trees will be planted in Brazil's Atlantic Forest through the Nature Conservancy's Plant a Billion Trees campaign.

Jacobs says that the company's BrightGreen Mortgage promotion encourages its branches to adopt environmentally friendly business practices, such as paper elimination, recycling, use of recycled materials and more. Jacobs says 48 of the company's branches participate in the promotion, which began this past October and will run through April. The promotion will culminate with a sweepstakes drawing for a Toyota Prius.

Jacobs says the trees will be planted in the names of the borrowers whose loans close through the BrightGreen Mortgage promotion.

Why Jacobs says he started 1st Metropolitan's BrightGreen Mortgage promotion to help raise awareness among the company's branches nationwide for the need to be more environmentally conscious.

He adds that while the promotion itself focuses on making small changes to everyday business practices to be more environmentally friendly, the idea to plant trees for every mortgage closed came because the company realized that not every loan can be completely paperless. As such, "we wanted to regenerate the paper we do use," Jacobs says.

Impact At press time, 1st Metropolitan branches have closed 378 mortgages through the BrightGreen Mortgage promotion, Jacobs says; thus, the company will help plant at least 378 trees through Plant a Billion Trees.

Through the Plant a Billion Trees campaign, which began this past April, the Nature Conservancy is working to restore 2.5 million acres of land in the Atlantic Forest by planting 1 billion trees in the next seven years, according to its Web site.

As of press time, Plant a Billion Trees had planted almost 1.2 million trees in the Atlantic Forest, according to the campaign's Web site.

Try it www.plantabillion.org

Ivanna C. Sukkar is senior associate editor at Scotsman Guide. Reach her at (800) 297-6061 or ivanna@scotsmanguide.com.

To share your company's story, e-mail helpinghands@scotsmanguide.com.