Co-Exist Australia
Co-Exist
A conservation app where young people turn up, check in, and watch the count of trees in the ground rise because they came.
The challenge
Co-Exist Australia runs conservation with young people across the country, tree plantings, beach clean-ups, restoration days held by local collectives. The work was real and the impact was real, but there was no way to run it at scale. Sign-ups lived in spreadsheets and group chats, attendance was counted by hand, and the impact of a day in the field vanished the moment everyone went home. A movement that runs on turning up had no way to show what turning up added up to.
What we built
We built Co-Exist as a native app on iOS and Android: a young person joins a local collective, sees their next event, and checks in on the ground while the check-in window is open. Leaders log the impact of the day against real metrics, trees planted, rubbish removed, hours given, and every number rolls up into a live dashboard the whole collective can see. The count of trees in the ground is not a marketing figure. It is the sum of the days people showed up to.
Impact, counted
The check-in ring
The check-in window opens while the event runs and closes when it ends, the way a planting actually works. You are there or you are not, and the app only counts you when you are standing on the site. That single honest constraint is what makes the running total mean something.
How we worked
One codebase ships the same app to both stores off a single Ecodia pipeline, so a fix reaches iPhone and Android the same afternoon. When a live event hit a check-in code collision mid-planting, the fix was scoped, shipped and in the store on the same day. The collective never runs the build; a leader runs the day and the app keeps the count.
One number, many small acts
45,273 trees is not one grand gesture. It is 416 separate days, 17 collectives, thousands of people each putting a few tubes in the ground. The app's whole job is to hold that arithmetic so the movement can see itself.
The count of trees in the ground is the sum of the days people showed up to.
What it adds up to
Impact is logged at the event, not reconstructed later, so the number a collective sees is the number they earned that day.
The same app carries a first-time volunteer through their first check-in and gives a leader the tools to run a hundred-person planting.
Co-Exist, built with Ecodia.
Further reading