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STORIES -> Success Stories
Ford Foundation Community-based Forestry Demonstration Program
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Federation of Southern Cooperatives,
Alabama. Photo by V. Sturtevant. |
Community-based Forestry in the United States has gained considerable momentum over the years, as a means of building the capacity of rural communities to be stewards of, and benefit from, forest ecosystems. Today, community practitioners are vibrantly engaged in many facets of forest management, including:
- Forest restoration
- Forest inventories and ecosystem surveys
- Sustainable timber harvesting
- Value-added wood processing,
- Managing and marketing non-timber forest products
- Biofuel production
- Trail construction and maintenance.
- Educational activities and public outreach
As the influence of these groups grows, funders, policy-makers, and researchers have begun asking how these groups function and what kind of organizational or management strategies are used to help advance both the economic health of these communities and the vitality of those resources they depend upon.
In partial response to these inquiries, the Ford Foundation established a 5-year Community-based Forestry (CBF) Demonstration Program in 2000. The Program involved 13 CBF groups, as implementing partners—including Forest Service personnel, who acted largely in an advisory capacity.
The Program was specifically designed to increase the ability of CBF groups to effect positive social, economic, and ecological change through forest stewardship—and as such, included a capstone research effort to highlight and validate the role of CBF organizations in bridging critical stewardship gaps.
This research effort was organized into distinct themes including (a) an institutional analysis of CBF organizations, (b) an examination of impacts on local communities (particularly access to resources, decision authority and the local economy), and (c) an analysis of how ecological knowledge and monitoring are used by the organizations to influence and strengthen efforts.
Through a variety of field tours, projects documents, interviews and focus group discussions, researchers conclude that:
- CBF groups create social and economic benefit for local communities, including access to forest assets, job security, job quality, land retention, and reduced social conflict.
- CBF groups create ecological benefits for local forests through their emphasis on landscape-scale planning and conservation, short-term management objectives (weed management, erosion control efforts, wildfire mitigation, etc), and ability to respond quickly to change and opportunity.
- CBF groups bridge gaps and span boundaries through direct services (ecosystem workforce development, business development, branding of goods and services), sharing and mitigating financial and political risks (cost-sharing, capital equipment purchase, involvement in demonstrations), and create foundations for the next generation of forest stewards through youth education.
If you would like to learn more about this innovative demonstration program or research results, please visit www.warnercnr.colostate.edu/frws/cbf/.
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PARTNERING WITH THE FOREST SERVICE
