Trammell S. Crow has spent his life bringing people together. This is the story of what happened when two people who had each spent years doing that on their own finally met.

Trammell’s path

In 2011, Trammell started Earth Day Dallas with a belief that the environment belongs to everyone. About 48,000 people came that first year. He kept building, and Earth Day Dallas became EarthX, one of the largest environmental gatherings in the world, with more than 177,000 people at Fair Park in 2019. He gave its stage to a prime minister and ambassadors, senators and members of Congress, company presidents and CEOs, scientists and students, ranchers and Rotarians, and he pledged to protect 250,000 acres of forest in Suriname. In 2019 he received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor. Through all of it, his real gift was the room he made for others.

Steve’s path

Steve Bender was building in a different way: one project, one club and one community at a time. With the Rotary Club of Newport Beach he helped send a medical box to an AIDS clinic in Nkandla, South Africa, and then the first Smiles in a Box dental clinic, which grew into dental and oral health clinics for children in Mexico and beyond. He helped students form an Interact club after their very first project, and in 2016 he founded Building Bridges through Rotary to connect clubs on both sides of the border. Then came Rotary Reefs in Panama, the 100 Projects in 100 Countries program and the 4-7-8-17 framework, all with the same idea: projects that are true, fair and built to last.

Where the paths met

On April 25, 2022, three days after Earth Day, they met in Trammell’s backyard on Turtle Creek in Highland Park, Dallas: the man who had built the stage and the Rotarian who had the projects. Trammell had the room. Steve had the people ready to fill it.

A year later, Steve brought Rotary to Trammell’s stage. On Friday, April 21, 2023, the first Rotary conference at EarthX filled the Blue Speaker Stage at Fair Park for three days: reefs, water, plastics, the Great Green Macaw, Ukraine and Rotary clubs from across Texas. At 2:40 that afternoon, Steve spoke about the Rotary Reef Project, and by evening Rotary was handing out its first Eco Contest awards on the same stage. Over the years, Steve has personally brought Past Presidents of Rotary International and former ambassadors to the EarthX stage. In 2024, Trammell opened and closed the Partnerships for the Goals conference. By 2026, the Environmental Xperience filled eight stages with 165 sessions. Projects that had started in a Rotary club meeting were now being heard by ministers and funders from around the world, and EarthX had new stories to tell.

Better together

Neither could have done it alone. A stage without projects is just a room, and projects without a stage stay small. Together, they became something larger than either one: forests in Finland and Panama that carry Trammell’s name, a Rotary Reef growing coral in Bocas del Toro, the Great Green Macaw returning to the rainforest, and today, 75 project websites around the world saying thank you.

That is what Trammell has always shown the world: when people come together, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This friendship is one more proof of it.

Happy 75th birthday, Trammell. Here is to the next chapter, together.