United States Endowment for Forestry and Communities, Inc.

The Endowment invests to: 1) keeping working forests as forests; and, 2) to advance family-wage jobs in rural, forest-rich communities. While we are blessed with millions of acres of forests in public ownership, the largest slice of the nation's forests are owned by individuals and families. Whether public or privately owned, markets for the full range of products that forests produce are vital to supporting forest health and retention and ensuring that those forests support the needs of rural communities nested within them.

The Endowment's theory of change is based upon three reinforcing strategies: 1) retaining healthy working forests; 2) generating value streams from forests for their owners and communities; and, 3) ensuring that communities nested within or near forests are. We seek to advance these over-arching objectives by investing through seven focal initiatives: a) forest retention; b) forest health; c) traditional product markets; d) non-traditional product markets (e.g. water); e) innovation (e.g. 21st Century products such as cellulosic nanomaterials and mass timbers); and, f) asset creation (assisting people of color in retaining their forests while climbing the economic ladder).

As the largest public charity investing in the working forest space we bring human, intellectual, and financial capital to the work. Our Board and staff bring rich and deep experience along with a passion for the work all focused on leveraging our resources and partnering with others to advance mutual objectives.

In the area of market retention and growth, we developed a vision for how USDA Research and Promotion programs (a.k.a. "commodity check-offs) that have been so successful in helping agricultural producers from beef to milk could be used in the forest sector. We co-funded and assisted in the creation of the first two check-offs for forest products -- softwood lumber and paper & paper-based packaging. Our $1 million investment has helped leverage $40 million in annual assessments that are supporting these two forest products market segments. In the non-traditional markets area we worked with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, land trusts, and the City of Raleigh, NC, to institute a watershed protection fee that is generating more than $2.2 million annually for the City to invest with private forest landowners to protect the watershed that supplies water for the City's residents. With the USDA Forest Service, Duke Energy, and a wide range of conservation and university partners, we have invested nearly $8 million to plumb the potential of modern biotechnology as a potential solution to address burgeoning forest health challenges driven by climate change and global trade & travel that are conspiring to unleash dozens of exotic pests and diseases against which our trees have no native resistance. Too, we have been the convener of four Canada/US Forest Health Summits to enhance cross-border collaboration on forest health and innovation issues recognizing that forest threats don't respect borders. Across the deep south we are working with the Forest Service, Natural Resources Conservation Service, and dozens of state and local partners, to diversify the ranks of family forest advocates as we work with more than 650 African American forest landowners so that they can clear title to their lands and join millions of other American landowners in enjoying the economic and other benefits of active forest management. To keep forests as forests we are working with the Department of Defense to buffer military reservations with working forests so that America's fighting men and women can focus on necessary training and we have created the National Conservation Easement Database (www.conservationeasement.us) to catalog and aid natural resources agencies and land trust in tracking the nation's growing "public estate" stewarded by private landowners. Among future work: 1) Advance new markets for 21st Century products from cellulosic nanotechnology to mass timbers to capture economic value and new family-wage jobs from green, forest-based products of the future. And, 2) working to advance an old technology -- torrefaction (the roasting of wood in a low-oxygen environment) -- to help provide a market outlet for low-value wood to help address the millions of acres of forest at risk of catastrophic wildfire.