Restoring the pawpaw (Asimina triloba) to the Northern Illinois, one planting day at a time.

The Pawpaw Foundation plants pawpaw trees and teaches Northern Illinois communities about their ecological, cultural, and nutritional value.

We do that by putting young pawpaws in the ground with schools, parks, churches, and prairie restorations across the county; getting pawpaw leaves and seedlings into the hands of students and community members; and running the education tent at the Pawpaw Festival in Paw Paw, Illinois with NIU — where neighbors can finally taste the fruit their grandparents may have known but most of us have never met.

The Pawpaw Foundation grew out of a shared conviction that the pawpaw, America's largest native fruit¹ and a tree that once grew across the woodlands of Northern Illinois,² deserves a place in our communities, our diets, and our ecological future.

We started in 2025 in DeKalb County, where the grove meets the prairie. From there we work outward: planting trees with schools, parks, churches, and prairie restorations; running classroom and community programs that put pawpaw leaves and seedlings into the hands of students and neighbors; and, every fall, running the education tent at the Pawpaw Festival in Paw Paw, Illinois alongside NIU, where anyone in the region can finally find out what the fruit tastes like.

Every tree we plant is a long bet. Pawpaws don't fruit for five to seven years, sometimes as many as ten.³We're betting that the people who plant them with us in 2026 will be the ones harvesting alongside their neighbors a decade on, and that Northern Illinois will be a little richer for it.