The Long Read

The story of how Our Forest Fund came to be and how we accomplished our first project to save trees in Kitsap County is a complex one, so for those of you who really want to know how it all transpired, here is the long read, written by Alia Pirzada.

A Clearcut in My Backyard

In our strawbale house in the woods outside of Poulsbo, Washington, I had been thinking about what I ought to do to make the world a better place, perhaps by volunteering with an environmental project in another country somewhere. But when one day in May of 2019 the gnashing of huge logging machines and the crashing of trees 50 feet from our bedroom drove me almost to panic, my life’s work landed at my doorstep.

The clearcut was literally in our backyard. It was shocking to witness the logging. Looking at a clearcut from afar doesn’t give you that gut punch that the devastation up close does. It looks like the aftermath of an explosion. When the giant logging machines and trucks stopped, I could hear nothing but silence. No insects, no birds, no life. Just dry wind. It was demoralizing and infuriating. I am seeing life come slowly back to the cut, but it will take decades for it to get back to the rich habitat it was — decades we may not have, thanks to global warming.

But it pushed me to do something to conserve the forest we still have, especially trees in a ‘forest park’.

Because indeed, this 40-acre block on the inauspiciously named Sawdust Hill Road in Kitsap County across Puget Sound from Seattle, is part of the Port Gamble Forest Heritage Park (PGFHP), one of the largest county parks in the country. Since it was part of a recent county parkland acquisition, pretty much everyone on the hill thought the heavily forested valley and steep ridges were safe forever. But there was a catch.

This acreage, once the ancestral lands of the Port Gamble S’Klallam and Suquamish tribes had become a Pope & Talbot Timber Company tree plantation back in the 1800s. In 2007, Pope Resources announced that it wanted to sell its holdings in Kitsap County and offered to sell the land to the county to become a park. By 2017, the county, the tribes, several land conservancy groups and the community managed to raise an astonishing $11,685,000 for the Kitsap Forest and Bay Project.

In order to conserve more land, 3,000 of the 3,500 acres were purchased without the timber rights, allowing the timber company one last harvest over the following 25 years. A lot of the community members and organizations that had donated to the fund to establish the park were not aware of this—and even if they were, most did not realize that “harvesting” meant clearcutting utterly.

Starting Small and Local

“You know,” said my neighbor Kim Greenwood as we surveyed the devastation, “When I moved here in 1996, I was vaguely aware that there would be a harvest on the road in about 20 years. That was a long way off, and I put it out of my mind. Where is the wildlife going to live now? We can’t do anything to protect these 40 acres of lost forest, but maybe something can be done to save the hundreds of acres of trees elsewhere in the park.”

Neither of us had done much in the way of activism before. We began by attending various local meetings to keep on top of any future plans for this parcel of land. We went door-to-door with a petition stating the neighborhood’s desire to prevent any kind of trail or park infrastructure in the Sawdust Hill block of the park.

Talking with our neighbors, we gathered more than 100 signatures from almost every residence along this rural road, because people were appalled by the clearcut. Everyone wanted it to just be left to wildlife again. Kim had the petition entered into the record at the county park’s advisory board.

We attended park stewardship meetings, county commissioners’ meetings, park advisory meetings, Environmental Lobby Day in the State Capitol, Board of Natural Resources meetings—pretty much any kind of venue where we could learn about who makes the decisions about parks and forests. Much of it was tedious and plodding, but as I wrote on my blog at the time, “This is what democracy looks like.”

We thought if we could buy the timber rights to the remaining trees in the park, there would be no final ‘harvest.’ The timber company gets the money and the community keeps the trees. A lot of wildlife would not lose their homes. It could be a win for the timber company, a win for the community, and a win for wildlife and the environment. As a former monoculture Douglas fir plantation, it would still need to be thinned and interplanted with diverse native tree species to truly become a vigorous forest, but 35 years of headstart would not be lost.

When we approached Mark Shorn, then chairman of the Port Gamble Forest Heritage Park Stewardship Group, to find out about the possibility of buying the remaining trees, he said, “You need to talk to my wife, Lynn. She really wants to save the trees, too.”

Phase Two of the Long View

Lynn Schorn was involved with the PGFHP way back with the original Kitsap Forest and Bay Project. She is a big-picture, long-game thinker. “I am a frequent park user, walking, biking, hiking. I love this park. I am proud of what we accomplished to create it.” For Lynn, buying the land was Phase 1 and it was successful, a whopping 3,500 acres saved from development.

But there was an option agreement in the sale contract for the community to buy the remaining timber rights at a later date. This was always in the back of Lynn’s mind: “Phase 2 is buying the trees.”

Meanwhile, hundreds of acres were being clearcut in other areas of the park. “I’d be walking along in the dark, cool forest, and then boom, the trail would empty out onto the heat, glare and destruction of a huge clearcut. It was truly disorienting. I couldn’t go up to some of my favorite areas of the park for months, because it was just too depressing,” recalled Lynn.

She decided to join forces with us to form Our Forest Fund (OFF), as a committee of three co-chairs. It was now pandemic time, but we met up outside to hash out the organization’s mission, which was “To save trees from clearcut type of harvest by acquiring timber rights, forested land, conservation easements and/or other forested assets by purchase or other means of acquisition.”

Different Strokes Propel the Project

Each of us came to the project with different skills. Detail-oriented Kim has a background in import compliance and logistics. “I love spreadsheets,” she says. An avid gardener and hiker, she’s also done a lot of volunteer work in stream and forest stewardship.

I don’t see the world in spreadsheets, but I know how to build WordPress websites, and have an eye for graphics and layout. I’d been an entrepreneur in travel and tea, and most recently was employed developing online language-learning modules for the Defense Languages Institute. But I’d never done any environmental or community activism before, and it took a disaster on my doorstep to prod me into action.

Lynn is not an enthusiastic adopter of the latest apps or of spreadsheets, but she’s all about working with other people in positive ways. She has long been a powerhouse of action in many different intersecting spheres, including the park stewardship group which maintains the park. She is a great networker and knows many people in local government.

A physical therapist by profession, Lynn often prescribes time in natural surroundings to augment more typical health therapies. Her volunteer work includes wildlife rehabilitation and forest stewardship, in addition to doing everything possible to get kids outdoors, be it hiking, biking or camping. She and her husband Mark sponsor music concerts in their barn to raise money for various causes.

Ferreting Out the Details

First, we needed to read the sale contract for the land, which had the timber rights option in it, to know what would be the mechanism for buying the trees. Neither the county nor Forterra, the land conservancy organization that negotiated the contract, were interested in pursuing the option at that time. Lynn tried her contacts at Olympic Resources (Pope’s land development arm) and at Forterra just to get some help in understanding the complex document, but they didn’t place any priority on the our request.

At a Bureau of Natural Resources monthly board meeting, I’d gotten the business card of attorney Peter Goldman from the Washington Forest Law Center. I had been impressed by his eloquence, competence and level-headedness. This man could surely help interpret the option agreement.

When I called him, he was generous with his time talking to me. Peter explained how we could be notified by the WA State Department of Natural Resources about every logging permit (Forest Practice Application, or FPA) pulled in a given area. If we had known how to do this before, perhaps we would have seen the unusual letter from Kitsap County Commissioner Charlotte Garrido appended to every FPA within the park. The letter stated that “for the purposes of logging, this is not a park.”

According to Washington State Forest Law, any parcel within 500 feet of a park of any sort is required to have a Class 4 Special environmental review, a more stringent and expensive environmental impact study than otherwise mandated. “This letter was used to circumvent state forest law,” said Peter, disgusted. It also meant that all the land surrounding the park boundaries would evade the required environmental review. (Much of that adjoining land is still owned by the timber company or its property development arm, among other landowners.)

Peter called the county and Forterra to ask a few questions, and by the next day, panicked missives were coming in from both, accusing Our Forest Fund of getting all litigious and adversarial. We thought, “Wow. This guy gets quite the response!”

But should we should pursue this line? If we riled everyone up, would it result in saving trees? In order to buy timber rights, we needed to have a willing seller, and it had to be implemented by a willing county government via Forterra. We chose to be pragmatic.

The Half-Million Dollar Ante

Another thing we learned from Peter was that in order to even open negotiations to buy any trees, we needed to have $500,000. Half a million dollars just to sit at the table with the timber company, which by this time had been bought by Rayonier, a multinational timber company headquartered in Florida. “We weren’t fazed,” recalled Kim later. “We were, too!” I countered. I had never done any fundraising, so $500 was just as intimidating as $500,000 to me. But “in for a penny, in for a pound”, as they say.

We set $500,000 as our fundraising goal, though we knew that to buy all of the trees would require much more. To get an idea of how much, the three of us paid out of pocket to hire a “timber cruiser” familiar with the park, to assess the value of the timber. He came up with the daunting figure of about $5 million. (In fact, the price the timber company wanted was much more than that, since they based their price on the eventual value of the trees at harvestable size, not the current standing value of the timber. But at least it gave us some idea of how big a project Our Forest Fund had taken on.)

No wonder Olympic Resources, the land conservancy groups and the county officials were skeptical of Our Forest Fund’s ability to pull this off. But we just kept plugging away. If you believe in the importance of your project, you just keep going. “We’ve got to keep our eyes on the prize,” said Lynn.

At the suggestion of then Kitsap County Commissioner Rob Gelder, Our Forest Fund set up an account with Kitsap Community Foundation (KCF) as their fiscal sponsor, each of us kicking in $400 to start with. We had considered becoming a 501c3 non-profit organization on our own, but the paperwork and regulations would take time away from the real work of saving trees. KCF would handle donations and make sure all the accounting and IRS filings were correct and proper. Now designated as OFF’s treasurer, Kim liaised with KCF and was the voice of circumspection and the parser of details.

Getting the Message Out

At the same time, I was building the ourforestfund.org website and designing a logo, business cards and stationery. We three collaborated on content, writing by committee—an admittedly arduous process. But eventually, we came up with a website that we feel presents our organization and mission accurately.

I designed a giant “Donate: Our Forest Fund.org” banner that Kim and I hung as high as possible on the trees on my property, facing the clearcut and the road. (My husband Bill grumbled, “Somebody’s defaced my clearcut…”) We also put up a series of smaller road signs, Burma Shave style, which revealed the message “Save… the… Forest… Cool… the… Planet” as one drove past. Then came posters, mugs and stickers. The first time I saw one of our stickers on a car I didn’t know in the parking lot of the supermarket, I smiled from ear to ear—it was so encouraging!

Talking and Listening

We conducted a survey at the trailheads of the park to gauge just how many people realized that most of the park would be clearcut and how many might be open to contributing to a fund to save the trees. Many park users did not know about the future clearcutting. Most definitely wanted to save the trees.

We staffed a booth at any kind of outdoor event in the area, such as a mountain bike fest, several farmers’ markets, and the Poulsbo half-marathon. Just anywhere we could talk to the public in person about saving trees. We met so many interesting people and heard their stories about losing forests, their concerns about the environment and wildlife habitat loss.

Some of these farmers’ market discussions could get pretty technical, with a few community members occasionally challenging the basic premises of the relationship between deforestation and global warming. We welcomed these discussions because it helped us hone our knowledge and communication skills, and inspired us to research more about trees, forests, and the climate emergency.

Deforestation is a significant contributor to global warming. Trees absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, storing the carbon and releasing the oxygen. Deforestation not only cuts off this efficient carbon-storage mechanism, but also unleashes the carbon already stored. Conserving forests can reduce these massive emissions now and in the future. The United Nations Environment Programme states that “limiting the average global temperature increase to 1.5°C is impossible without a major role for forests”. Therefore, maintaining existing forests is crucial in combating climate change.

We also talked with people who were concerned about logging job loss. We explained that we don’t have a problem with all logging, just clearcut type of logging. It is unrealistic to expect all logging to stop. That’s not going to happen. But, as Kim pointed out, “If they hadn’t clearcut the Sawdust Hill block like they did, if they didn’t try to pull every little bit of wood out of those acres, but had logged selectively and left some trees, we wouldn’t have even formed Our Forest Fund.” Perhaps timber companies ought to take that into consideration when they choose how to log.

Lynn continued to network with everyone she could think of, and also researched using carbon credits to raise funds for the trees. She sponsored concerts and a mushrooming workshop at her barn. She also kept the county and the PGFHP Stewardship Group apprised of Our Forest Fund’s work, believing so strongly in collaboration as she does. “I didn’t want them to think we were going away or that the effort to save the trees could be ignored.” All three of us attended and presented — either in person, by Zoom, or by webinar — at more meetings and trainings than we can count.

A Lightbulb Moment

One of my ideas for funding forests sprang from my background as the owner of a discount travel agency back in the ’80s. Since air travel is one of the biggest contributors to carbon in the atmosphere and to the climate crisis, my idea was to establish an airport fee to fund conservation and expansion of forests. A carbon baggage fee, in essence. To this end, in February of 2021, I emailed Washington State Senator Christine Rolfes to discuss the potential for an airport fee, among other issues. In August, out of the blue, Sen. Rolfes’ aide wrote to ask if I would like to meet with the senator at a local coffee shop in early October. “Sure! I will be there! Thank you so much!”

I expected to be in a long line of supplicants at the coffee house that blustery day in October, but was surprised to find I was the only person the senator was meeting there. While my main aim at this meeting was to move forward on the carbon baggage fee, I also talked about the timber rights purchase option at the Port Gamble park and about Our Forest Fund’s mission. “We need $500,000 just to even open discussions with the timber company, so that’s what we’re working on right now,” I said, not actually having the nerve to ask outright for funding.

Senator Rolfes, who at the time was chair of the Senate Ways and Means Committee and had been a big supporter of establishing the park in the first place, suddenly got a glint in her eyes. It was as though a light bulb went off above her head.

“I think I know where I can get that $500,000,” the senator mused with a smile. “Really? That would be great,” I responded calmly, not wishing to belie my excitement.

In March of 2022, it was announced that $300,000 had been allocated in the state budget for the purchase of trees in the Port Gamble Forest Heritage Park. Our Forest Fund’s co-chairs were ecstatic. The $300,000 went directly to the county of course, not to OFF, but we knew it was a direct result of our efforts. By this time, OFF had $32,000 in the account at KCF.

Tilting at Windmills Through the Smoke

Throughout the pandemic years, Our Forest Fund kept on keeping on, not knowing if we could raise the necessary half a million or if indeed Rayonier, the county or Forterra would honor and implement the timber rights purchase option. “I’m sure some people felt we were just tilting at windmills and put money in our jar because they felt sorry for us. But they also wanted to save trees and do something tangible to cool the earth,” said Lynn.

The summer of 2021 brought a once-in-a-millennium “heat dome” to the Pacific Northwest, roasting the normally moderate area with triple-digit temperatures. Smoke drifted in from forest fires all over Washington, Oregon, California, British Columbia and Idaho, creating an eerie orange haze for weeks, oppressive and dystopian. If anything showed that the environment was out of whack and that there was nowhere to run, it was that summer and the next. Said Kim sadly, “We’re all climate refugees now.”

But we three also believe that trees saved anywhere help the planet everywhere. “The Brazilian rainforest needs protecting, and Siberian forests and Australian forests, all trees everywhere—but it’s all one ecosystem, our Earth. We all need to conserve forests wherever we can.” We at Our Forest Fund feel that this is the most impactful thing we can do, our legacy, something that will improve the environment now and for centuries.

The Big Reveal

Every so often, Our Forest Fund would have a Zoom meeting with Kitsap County Commissioner Rob Gelder to keep him updated on our efforts and to see if there was any movement on the county’s part. There never was much. Running a county is a massively complex job, and Rob was a busy man.

Then on May 24, 2022, Our Forest Fund was invited to a meeting with the county commissioner and Forterra about the timber rights purchase option. We wondered, “What’s this about? Are we finally being taken seriously? Are we at the table with the big kids now?”

I was vacationing out on the Washington coast but drove several miles to a restaurant that had free Wi-Fi and joined the meeting by phone from my car. Lynn and Kim joined from their homes. Rob was bursting with excitement, but let Forterra make the announcement.

After more than a year’s negotiating, a deal had been struck in principle to purchase from Rayonier the timber rights on 756 acres of trees out of the 1956 acres in the park that hadn’t yet been clearcut. Funding had been secured for all but $500,000 of the total purchase price, which neither Forterra nor the commissioner could mention because the contract was not yet signed. We were told that under no circumstances could we hint publicly that a deal was in process until the contract had been signed and we were given the go-ahead by Forterra.

This new community goal of the last $500,000 would need to be raised by October 31—only about five months away. As soon as the deal was official, which Forterra expected in a week or two, they would let us know when Our Forest Fund could tell its supporters about it. And they wanted OFF to use Forterra’s verbiage and GoFundMe account to collect donations, “for consistent messaging.”

Waiting for the Starter’s Pistol

While we were happy that there was a deal for part of the acreage, we had questions. Was this a one-time deal or could the remaining acres of timber rights be bought at a later date? Was there a clause stipulating this in the contract? What would happen if that last $500,000 was not raised by the deadline? What was the percentage taken by the GoFundMe platform?

We take our mission very seriously and are committed to making sure that every donated dollar goes to buying trees. (We have never taken any salary or wage for our OFF work.) Our supporters gave to save trees, and we want as little as possible to be siphoned off for admin fees. It turned out that Kitsap Community Foundation charged a smaller transaction percentage than GoFundMe. So we decided to continue to point donors to Our Forest Fund’s account at KCF.

We kept on working the Poulsbo Farmers Market, sending out email newsletters and networking. It was frustrating to know that there was movement happening in saving these trees, and yet we were unable to say a thing. People would ask about any news of progress or a timeline, and we had to be vague and talk with earnest optimism without being disingenuous. And it really would have been nice for either Forterra or the county to have told us that they had been working on it. That we weren’t just struggling along all by ourselves. All that time… it would’ve been nice to have been trusted.

But we held up our end of the bargain and waited for the go-ahead from Forterra. A few weeks turned into a month, turned into three months. Finally in mid-August, we heard from Forterra, saying it was a go. Not only that, but through a generous anonymous donor, every dollar raised would be matched by eight more dollars!

You Can Only Do What You Can Do

Our Forest Fund had $54,000 in its coffers—money given by hundreds of small contributors as well as larger gifts from charitable foundations and individuals. There had been grants from both the Port Gamble S’Klallam and Suquamish tribes, and also from local businesses.

Because that October 31 deadline hadn’t changed, instead of having five months to raise another $446,000, we now had just a little over two months. A tall order! But additionally, what Forterra and Commissioner Gelder didn’t know was that all three of OFF’s co-chairs would be out of the country for much of that time.

Like so many people, we’d each individually booked post-pandemic breakout trips to Europe months before. By chance, we were all leaving within a week of each other in early September. How on earth were we going to be able to run the campaign?

We decided we could only do what we could do. It wasn’t our fault that we hadn’t been able to charge ahead with fundraising because of the prolonged negotiations, nor that the deal came together just in time to coincide with our trips abroad. One of my favorite quotes is from Teddy Roosevelt, “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are,” and it certainly applied here.

Calling in the Cavalry

Lynn had already come up with strategies to ramp up outreach to cover the absence of the three group leaders. She got OFF supporters to staff a table at the park’s main trailhead under the big yellow OUR FOREST FUND banner strung between trees. One volunteer baked tree-shaped cookies to give away. “A great idea we should have thought of before!” exclaimed Kim.

We posted signs in the park with the QR code to the OFF account page at KCF, and tech-savvy park-users used them to make donations right at the trailhead. One of the volunteers set up an Instagram page, but it didn’t get much traction. We kept hoping somebody who knew how to use Facebook effectively would turn up, but none did. “Social media may not be that important to people who are into real stuff like forests and nature, I guess,” mused Lynn.

I sent out an email blast on August 16, 2022, to call for donations to make the community goal. Since the majority of the funding had already been located through county, state and Forterra’s sources, the original goal to raise $500,000 to get the ball rolling was now positioned to be the final part of the funding to cap the deal. This was hard to explain succinctly, and we were concerned that possible donors might get lost in the woods, so to speak.

The “times eight match” certainly caught people’s attention. (To this day, we have no idea who the anonymous donor was, but are incredibly grateful that they structured their funding in this way.) As we were new at this business of fundraising, it took us a while to realize that Forterra was bundling the county funds with the anonymous private donor’s gift to come up with this 8x match. Without a doubt, it spurred all sorts of donors to contribute in the short time frame that we had. If your $100 could buy $900 worth of trees, wouldn’t you pitch in?

The First Big Grant

Kim had already left for Scotland when an email arrived on September 5 from David Myers of the David and Carol Myers Foundation, asking if Our Forest Fund could Zoom with him later in the day. Lynn, out kayaking, paddled furiously across Gamble Bay and barely made the meeting in time.

David, an affable and positive-thinking professor of psychology at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, chatted with me and Lynn about the project. He and his family have longtime roots in the Kitsap area, though they live in Michigan now. They run a charitable foundation that disburses the proceeds of David’s many books. He mentioned a possible donation of $5,000 to $10,000. We were thrilled.

Shortly after the Zoom call, David emailed that his foundation would be making a much more substantial donation, since the 8x match meant that every dollar would have the power of $9. I responded that Our Forest Fund would gladly put to use any amount they wished to give!

Two days later, when Lynn had taken off for Ireland, David wrote to say that their family foundation had decided to gift an astounding $100,000. Needless to say, whoops of elation were heard ‘round the world—in Poulsbo, Washington, Dublin, Ireland, and Edinburgh, Scotland.

Reaping Fruit from Seedlings Planted Earlier

Smaller contributions were continuing apace, and the fund now had topped $170,000. Donations ranged from spare bills at the trailhead to checks for $5,000 and more. After the Myers donation was announced, other foundations and larger donors decided to take the plunge. Many of the “seedlings” we had planted along the way began to bear fruit. The names of family non-profit foundations that we had previously contacted started to show up in OFF’s roster of donors in the account at KCF.

The following week, Our Forest Fund received another $100,000 grant from a different foundation in Bellingham, Washington, with whom we had spoken some months before. When Kitsap Community Foundation notified them of the donation, I was strolling with my husband Bill along a boulevard in Paris. I stopped short and told him in shock, “We got another $100,000 donation! Oh my God! Incredible!” I did a victory dance in the street.

When she heard about the second $100,000, that’s when Kim thought, “I think we might actually pull this off!” Donations of $1,000 to $50,000 started coming in, along with smaller sums. Hundreds of individuals wanted to save these trees. The little tree-shaped “donation meter” I had put on the website was filling up steadily as I input the latest totals at night from northern Spain.

Bringing It Home

Kim and Lynn returned to Washington State at the end of September, and Bill and I three weeks after that. Lynn and Mark held several benefit concerts in their red barn, and Kim went back to tabling at the trailhead.

Some donations were sent to Forterra’s GoFundMe, but the bulk of the $500,000 was coming into Our Forest Fund’s account. It was clear, as Kim had predicted, that we were going to reach the target. Combined with the GoFundMe deposits, we were able to announce two days early that the community goal had been achieved. In fact, Our Forest Fund ended up with almost $100,000 over and above the $387,522 check we cut to Kitsap County Parks to close the deal.

In the end, the total price to make the deal was $4,425,000. 756 acres of trees were spared clearcutting. That is the same area as 12,000 tennis courts or 572 football fields. That comes to about $5,900 per acre of timber rights.

Today, that forest is being ecologically thinned by the county parks department and interplanted with diverse native trees so that in time it will become a vibrant, natural forest, a complex ecosystem, brimming with life—far more resilient than the monoculture Douglas fir plantation that existed for the prior 150 years. Kitsap County Parks forester emeritus Arno Bergstrom estimates that even after thinning, based on 200 trees saved per acre, 150,000 trees were saved. This works out to approximately $29 per tree saved.

But we have not broken out the champagne yet. After we took almost a year off from fundraising, we’ve set our sights on buying the timber rights to the remaining 1,200 acres of trees in the park. Our first goal this time around: One million dollars. Ambitious? Perhaps not, given how strongly the community supported the first campaign.

Advice for Aspiring Activists

I asked my partners what their advice is for others who want to take on a project to improve the world. Unsurprisingly, we each spoke from our own skillsets, but we all concur with the points brought up by the others:

“Find collaborators: you can’t do it alone. Maybe you can do some good on your own, but you can accomplish so much more if you recruit others and partner with other organizations,” advises Lynn. “Everybody has strengths and weaknesses. Their strengths will fill in the gaps in yours, and vice versa. And when you get discouraged, their steadfast belief in the project will keep you going.”

Kim feels that having a person who keeps the numbers in line is also key. “The devil is in the details,” she says. “Whether it’s looking at the minutia of contracts or county regs, or accounting for expenses and donations, it really helps to have someone who likes to do that. We were also very fortunate in having Kitsap Community Foundation as our fiscal sponsor, so we knew all the money was being administered correctly. And you have to hang in there with your team—you can have disagreements, but you’re in it to achieve the same goal. You have to believe in your mission, because change doesn’t happen overnight.”

My advice is to have a quality website made. Your website is often the public’s first point of contact with you. It should look professional and give value. By refining what you say on your website, you really clarify in your own minds the mission of your organization. You can then better communicate what you are trying to do and why it’s important.

Don’t despair if you don’t know how to use Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or Twitter. We do collect email addresses from interested people to build a mailing list and try to keep supporters up to date on the tree campaign. Try out guerilla marketing methods of reaching your audience, like banners, road signs, stickers and such, if appropriate. Make presentations to community groups. Staffing booths at markets and events allowed us real in-person contact, which we all think is very important. Maybe it’s not a hundred thousand “likes,” but each and every person you talk with provides a real connection. Virtual has its place, but real is real!

We all want you to know how very important it is to just jump in and try. We had no idea how successful we were going to be, how we could possibly raise the kind of money the project would require, or how to get our government representatives to support the project. “We were just distressed and angered by the clearcutting. That prompted us to join forces and try to conserve forests. To DO something positive instead of just cursing or weeping. Because of that, 150,000 trees that would’ve been clearcut are still standing,” said Lynn.

Most of all, we want others to know that if we can do it, you can do it. So stop thinking about it and start working on it! Best of luck to you!